Blogs and Podcasts

A quick note on an important point that I missed originally in Microsoft’s announcement. As users are starting to find their basic authentication mechanisms are being actively disabled, Microsoft have provided one last mechanism to prevent a complete outage if you rely on basic authentication currently. Which Protocols Are Impacted? If you’re using basic authentication for any of the following protocols, you might find that suddenly it has stopped working:Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) Exchange Web Services (EWS) IMAP MAPI Offline Address Book (OAB) POP Remote PowerShell RPC I Think This Impacts Me, What Do I Do? Microsoft are offering one final time to re-enable Basic Authentication, via the self-service diagnostics, direct link here.From this link, you can see which protocols are disabled, and choose a specific protocol that you can re-enable. Warning: Microsoft Are Serious This Time Microsoft have stated that any protocols that are re-enabled will be automatically disabled in the first c

Why protecting Microsoft 365 data is so important Your organization's data is one of its most valuable assets. That's why it's so important to have a plan in place to protect it. Microsoft 365 provides a comprehensive set of tools and services to help you safeguard your data, but it's up to you to put them to use.In this post, we'll explore some of the key ways you can protect your Microsoft 365 data, including enabling multi-factor authentication, using Azure Information Protection, using Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, and more.Don't wait until it's too late to start protecting your data. Read on to learn more about how you can keep it safe with Microsoft 365.The Importance of Data Protection Data protection is critical for any organization that relies on Microsoft products and services. By ensuring that data is protected, organizations can maintain the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their data. Additionally, data protection can help organizations meet compliance req

Hey guys, here are some cool gears for grabs! This is the right time to learn about VMware Aria Hub.This offer is only available during the VMware Explore Europe 2022 period which is from the November 7th through November 11th, 2022. Go to the Hands-on-Labs area and request HOL-2301-08-ISM “VMware Aria Hub – A look at what’s next in Multi-Cloud Management”.At the completion of the lab, you will be able to order Cloud Management gear as a gesture of our appreciation to be shipped to you*.Hey guys, let’s run with this….  

Thinking of becoming a Veeam Vanguard or a Veeam Legends and you want to know what is all about the Veeam 100 Summit that everyone talking about?When you read this recap of the first day you will understand what you  can expect when you are a Veeam Vanguard or a Veeam Legend and join in the Veeam 100 Summit.The Veeam 100 Summit is all about content sharing and also a get together with a group of people from all over the world and talk about technology and other subjects. And yes you can make good friends in this group. And of course, the summit is just a part of this great Veeam community program #Veeam100In this first day there was a lot of content sharing.First Day:First Session - Introduction and 2022 Veeam 100 Summit KickoffThe first session starts with a welcome to everyone and the new arrivals(new Vanguards, Legends, and MVP). In this session, Rick, Madi, and Hennes talk about Vanguard, Legends, and MVP.A lot of information about what the program is (for the new ones) and what to

Hi Folks, It will be a great honour and huge pleasure to have a chat with Mumshad Mannambeth from Kodekloud. I found all the Kubernetes certifications to be very challenging exams. Kodekloud’s courses are excellent and the practice exams prepared me for what was going to come. All of the Linux Foundation exams (except for the entry level KCNA) are hands on from the command line. There are time restraints and you have to solve real problems that can occur in production. The experience was like dealing with multiple priority 1 emergencies one after the other. The key is learning the material but also putting the kubectl commands to muscle memory. Of course keeping your cool is a huge priority. I hope to find out a lot of interesting details from Mumshad about how he created Kodekloud but also get some tips on what is coming and what are the hot topics in the Devops education world.  

Last week Veeam did release Veeam Backup for Salesforce (VBSF). VBSF is a completly new product which offers backup for the Salesforce CRM plattform.Salesforce only has very limited possibilities for backing up your data & metadata, just like many other PaaS vendors (plattform as a service). On the other hand they recommend their customers to regularly create backups. For more informations see this article: Best practices to backup Salesforce dataInstallationVBSF is supported to run on CentOS 7, RedHat Linux 7/8 and Oracle Linux 7/8, and uses PostgreSQL as a database. So in order to install and manage it, you should have at least some basic Linux skills. You can choose to install the software and it’s dependencies manually, or use the setup script provided by Veeam, which automates all the necessary steps:sudo curl https://repository.veeam.com/yum/el/vbsf-install-script.sh --output ./vbsf-install-script.shsudo sh ./vbsf-install-script.shhttps://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbsf/usergu

The following disclosure vulnerability (CVE-2022-22948) was reported to VMware by Yuval Lazar (@Ul7raVi0l3t) of Pentera. To remediate this vulnerability, apply the patch in the response matrix below as it applies to you. The vCenter Server contains an information disclosure vulnerability due to improper permission of files. VMware has evaluated the severity of this issue to be in the Moderate severity range with a maximum CVSSv3 base score of 5.5.Below are the affected productsVMware vCenter Server (vCenter Server) VMware Cloud Foundation (Cloud Foundation)An information disclosure vulnerability in VMware vCenter Server was privately reported to VMware. Updates are available to remediate this vulnerability in affected VMware products.Known Attack VectorsA malicious actor with non-administrative access to the vCenter Server may exploit this issue to gain access to sensitive information.ResolutionTo remediate CVE-2022-22948 apply the patches listed in the 'Fixed Version' column of the 'R

Nowadays a lot customers are using M365 and that’s a good choice!What are the most important components of this SaaS solution :Exchange online Sharepoint Online Teams Onedrive for Business Wow, instead of having your data on-premise we have it now in the public cloud!Is that a good idea?Yes, it’s running on a big high available infrastructure, always available and everywhere available whether we are at the office or at home.We are rid of upgrades – maintenance – security patches, just pay on a monthly base and Microsoft does the rest for us.True?Absolutely not !!!Hmm, what do we still have to do as a customer?Taking care of the backups of all your data in M365 !!!Is Microsoft not doing this for us, in our monthly fee?Not at all! That is one of the biggest misconceptions : Microsoft is not taking care of everything.In short : the customer is responsible for their own data in M365.Microsoft is not taking care of your data and is not taking backups and will never restore your data if need

For my first Veeam Community post, I thought I would share with you all something I’ve been doing for over a decade - an exam prep Study Guide; this one being for VMware VCP-DCV 2021. For those who haven’t followed me over the years, I started creating these “outlines”, i.e. Study Guides, for my own benefit to help me with tech cert exam prep. I then thought others in the community may benefit using them, so I decided to share them online. I generally post them on Twitter, so if you’d like to follow me, you can do so from here.When reviewing the VMware ‘Blueprint’ for the DCV 2021 exam as compared to the 2020 exam, I was initially overwhelmed by the additional content for 2021. As I dove deeper into the 2021 exam Objectives, it turns out a lot of them were similar to what was asked to know for the 2020 exam, so it wasn’t too bad to review. As with most of my Guides, I enjoyed learning about the new tech VMware implemented with vSphere 7 - e.g. Identity Federation & Lifecycle Manage

Unable to add extent Local Repository because it servers as the target for one or more job types which are not supported by a scale-out backup repository. We trying to add a new scale-out repository.

Hi there! I would like to share with all of you this awesome tool called Apache GuacamoleApache Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway. It supports standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH.I use it a lot to connect to my HomeLab, instead of enabling a VPN and open few RDP and SSH, I use my Navigator to connect to my Servers, no matter where Im connecting from (Ipad, Macbook, Raspberry Pi, Windows, etc.)For me is very useful, you can add MFA, SSL Cert, etc. very flexible and friendly.Here you will find the Installation files, instructions and useful information.Just a few screenshots!These are from my home lab. In another post, I will share with you a basic deploy and configuration, over vsphere. Home access Connections list Windows Server 2016 RDP over HTML5!SSH over HTML5!Windows Server + other tabs on topenjoy!.

Recently I needed to restore a SAP Oracle Database and I received this error below: After open a ticket with Veeam support I discover that this error has relation with SAP Oracle Databases specifically. The solution was a fix on Veeam Explorer for Oracle. After applying it my restore ran successfully.However, it doesn't have a public KB about this error and only support Veeam has access for this fix.So, if any of you get this kind of error, I recommend open a ticket with Veeam to solve your problem as soon as possible.

This is part two of the blogpost. Part one can be found here: SOBR Archive Tier – Explained and Configured – Part 1 of 4 | Veeam Community Resource HubIn this part will will discuss the reason behind having different tiers and how they appear within Microsoft Azure. Hot or Cool? – what’s it all aboutS3 storage or blob storage as it is also called is offered by the hyperscalers in various flavors that basically differ in speed of access and the cost charged for the in- or egress of data as well as its storage. We can generally decide between hot, cool and archive for Microsoft Azure. This translates to Standard and Standard-IA (=infrequently accessed) with Amazon AWS. The concept behind is the same. In the following I will stick to the terminology as of Azure.The capacity tier of the SOBR allows us to leverage either “hot” or “cool” storage tiers from the portfolio the hyperscaler offers. Both tier modes have the same access methodology (API) and the main difference is:Hot: Higher stora

In this Link https://bp.veeam.com/vbo/ you can find everything related to:Best Practice Guide for Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365This guide is intended to provide best practices for Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. It is not meant as a full documentation or detailed explanation of features. Please refer to the Veeam Help Center for this kind of documents.The best practice guide is inteded for professionals who search for a best practice answer to different topics. To allow deeper understanding of why we recommend specific best practices we add deeper information on the topics where applicable.Be aware that a best practice is not the only answer available. It will fit in the majority of cases but can also be totally wrong under different circumstances. Make sure you understand the implications of the advised best practices or ask someone who does. This time we will seeConfiguration Maximums This section covers the supported VBO configuration maximums. Numbers might vary depe

Next week it will be back to Kubernetes but this week we are still talking O365 Backups  

IntroAn often overlooked feature we can leverage since V11 is the archive tier for the Scale-Out-Backup-Repository (SOBR).SOBR: Tiers against fears… 😉While we find quite some good guidelines for the Veeam side of the functionality (e.g. Archiving Backup with Microsoft Azure Blob | Veeam Community Resource Hub), I’d consider it helpful to have some more insights to the technology and a guideline to also set up the hyperscalers side of the archive tier. I’ll choose Microsoft Azure here as an example. In the following blogpost with four parts (TLDR), I’ll walk you through some background and the complete setup.  A short history of the SOBRA scalable storage layer for backups is crucial for larger environments. This is why Veeam brought us the Scale-Out-Backup-Repository with VBR version 9.0 already. First it only consisted of the so called “performance tier” – that is the on-premises storage devices being pooled together as so called “extents” in a very flexible way.With Version 9.5 U4 t

I’ve just seen VMware has announced a revision to their expected release date of vSphere & vSAN 8, and for the right reasons! The VMware vSphere 7.0 Legacy I won’t go on a bashing spree of VMware vSphere 7 release, but… it wasn’t good. The highlights of which include aggressive wear & tear, and subsequent killing of, SD cards and lower durability storage. Additionally, VMware had to temporarily pull some v7 U3 releases due to Quality Assurance (QA) issues.With the issues mentioned above being part of the story of the infamous v7 release history, I felt positive when my RSS reader pulled [UPDATE: Link has been pulled by VMware] this article [/UPDATE] from VMware this morning. In summary, General Availability (GA) of vSphere & vSAN 8.0 have both been pushed to the 11th October 2022, with VMware specifically calling out addition time wanted for QA. [UPDATE] As this link has been pulled, I can't confirm if this is still VMware's proposed date, or if it was a placeholder. [/UPDA

VMware Aria Operations (formerly VMware vRealize Operations) automates and simplifies IT management with full-stack visibility from physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure including Virtual Machines (VMs) and containers to the applications they support. It delivers continuous performance optimisation, efficient capacity and cost management, proactive planning, intelligent remediation and integrated compliance. It is available on premises and as-a-service. More information on this product here, and link to my blogpost. An arbitrary file read vulnerability in VMware Aria Operations was privately reported by Yu Dai of NSFOCUS TIANJI Lab to VMware. There are updates (patches) to remediate these vulnerabilities in the affected VMware products. What Exploit does this Vulnerability Present? A malicious actor with administrative privileges may be able to read arbitrary files containing sensitive data.  Remediation To remediate CVE-2022-31682, apply the patches listed in the ‘Fixed Version’

VMware vCenter Server is advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling your VMware vSphere environments, allowing you to automate and deliver a virtual infrastructure across the hybrid cloud with confidence. With VMware Center, you gain centralized visibility, simplified and efficient management at scale, and extensibility across the hybrid cloud from a single console. Here is the link to my blogpost. The following vulnerability was reported by Yaron Zinar and Sagi Sheinfeld of Crowdstrike to Vmware. The vCenter Server contains a privilege escalation vulnerability in the IWA (Integrated Windows Authentication) authentication mechanism. VMware has evaluated the severity of this issue to be in the Important severity range with a maximum CVSSv3 base score of 7.1. Impacted ProductsVMware vCenter Server (vCenter Server) VMware Cloud Foundation (Cloud Foundation)What Exploit does this Vulnerability Present? A malicious actor with non-administrative

This morning I was thinking about various backup solution, and one thing cross my mind.One of great advantage about Veeam over other vendors(BEYOND THE FACT THAT THE BACKUP WORKS. ALWAYS. GOOD. EVERYWHERE.) (If you have used other solutions in the past you know what that means.)is that Veeam release a free Community Edition, an almost full feature version to be tested heavily in our lab so we can fully understand the product, and try on our skin basics about backup and recovery.It is taken for granted, but it is a significant added value to me.So, thank you Veeam.Have you ever thought about it?

 Hi everyone,Have you ever wanted a chance to get Microsoft Certified? Now’s your chance!If you haven’t seen the Cloud Skills Challenge before, it’s simple. Microsoft provide multiple learning ‘Track’ options, courtesy of their free Microsoft Learn resources. If you complete one or more tracks within their pre-defined challenge window (12th October to 9th November 2022), you’ll earn one free exam voucher, valid for a selected list of exams.Interested? Read on! What are the tracks? These tracks tend to change every Cloud Skills challenge, this time around the tracks are:Microsoft Ignite: Intelligent Cloud Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Cloud App Maker Challenge Microsoft Ignite: AI Automation Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Modern Work Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Field Service Automation Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Protect Everything Challenge Microsoft Ignite: Cloud Developer ChallengeSee below for a breakdown of these tracks, and the exam & certification path they’re aligned to. Microsof

Protecting your Business communication is not joking matter. “Your business” means many things to many different people. For some it is their commercial endeavours, for others it may be their Church, Synagogue or Mosque communication, it may just be the communication that you have with your child’s educational institution. Either way our digital communication has become an important pillar of our daily life and you owe it to yourself to make sure that it is protected.  

Hi everyone! I would like to share with all of you, this fantastic site with a lot of useful virtual appliances and tools!Maybe most of you will already know it, but I want to expose it and put it on everybody's radar!BITNAMI by vmware! Every time I need to deploy something, specially when its in the Lab or for test / Dev, I look in here,I don't want to re-invent the wheel, if is already created, why don't use it instead of re-installing and dealing with issues and research. When I need to deploy a LAMP, WAMP, or any other application listed in here, they have a lot! I gram a .ova and deploy it on my virtual lab! Now they also cover Kubernetes, cloud providers, docker, and of course vmware!  Do you have any other place where you usually pick your applications / tools?Please share it to build a list of resources for all of us!I will try to catch them all and get them on a cool list! 😃 enjoy!

 It took two tries, but I completed the Veeam Certified Architect (VMCA) certification exam.  While taking it twice was not my ideal way to pass the exam, I found the newest version of the exam much easier to handle, including the setup and much better than the initial exam release for v1.  Below are my thoughts on the exam itself and things you can prepare before you book it. Training Requirements If you are new to Veeam exams, there is a requirement for taking the courses before you site the exams for both VMCE and VMCA.  While I had the VMCAv1 already, and I didn’t need to sit in the class, I did nonetheless.  I am thrilled I sat the course as it was a complete overhaul of the v1 course and a much better way to learn is primarily hands-on.   You can read my course review here -Veeam Certified Architect 2022 - Course ReviewFurther, each is now a “versioned” exam for each year - in this case, VMCA 2022, with versioning done on an annual basis.  Each exam will need to be independently

I created this topic to put some order to @haslund  20 threads about his fantastic VMCA 2022 Official prep course, so we avoid dispersing information, questions and answers unnecessarily.@Kseniya hope this help our community.Remember to tag @haslund  when you need an official answer and to thank him for all his amazing work, of course :)   Sources of first topic: