A blog about virtualization, cloud, storage, networking and IT stuff.

One of my personal predictions for 2017 is, that Microsoft Azure will gain more market share.

The downside of using WordPress is that many people use it.

As a frequent reader of my blog, you might have noticed that vcloudnine.de was unavailable from time to time.

The year 2016 is coming to an end (thank god…). 2016 was a difficult year.

As part of a troubleshooting process, I had to disable circular logging on a Microsoft Exchange 2013 mailbox database, that was part of a Database Availability Group (DAG).

As part of a project, I had to deploy a VMware EUC Access Point appliance.

Today, I have stumbled upon a fact that is worth being documented.

You need tools and methods to accomplish your daily tasks.

Some days ago, my colleague Claudia and I started to work on a new project: A greenfield deployment consisting of some well known building blocks: HPE ProLiant, HPE MSA, HPE Networking (now Aruba) and VMware vSphere.

The HPE OfficeConnect 1920 switch series is designed for SMBs.

Nearly a month ago, a tweet caught my attention: New Blog Post: Discounted VCP7-DTM Beta Exam for a Limited Time https://t.co/IkwLTDdvO5 — VMware Learning (@VMwareEducation) October 4, 2016 These beta exams are a cost-effective way to achieve certificatio…

I wanted to retire my Synology DS414slim, and switch completely to vSAN.

A few days ago, I ran into a very nasty problem.

3 days ago, on 13th October 2016, HPE has released patch bundle 9,08 for Data Protector 9.

In my last post (Routed Port vs.

Many years ago, networks consisted of repeaters, bridges and router.

Customers that use HPE 3PAR StoreServs with 3PAR OS 3.2.1 or 3.2.2 and VMware ESXi 5.5 U2 or later, might notice one or more of the following symptoms: hosts lose connectivity to a VMFS5 datastore hosts disconnect from the vCenter VMs hang during I/O oper…

Recently, a customer has informed me, that copy sessions to encrypted devices failed, after he has made an update to Data Protector 9.07.

The Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) was developed in 1998 as an open standard protocol.

Sometimes you have to check when the last backup of an Exchange mailbox database was taken.

When you use Microsoft Outlook in cached mode, what I always recommend, and you add additional mailboxes to your outlook profile, you will notice that the OST file will grow.

Edit: If you have already installed .NET 4.6.1, check this blog post on how to remove it (You Had Me At EHLO…) Microsoft Exchange heavily relies on Microsoft .NET Framework.

Another bug in Exchange 2016 CU2.

After deploying a new Microsoft Exchange organization with Exchange 2016, or after deploying a Microsoft Exchange 2016 into an existing organization, you might notice a strange behaviour regarding the Offline Address Books (OAB).

Sometimes it’s necessary to have two DNS servers that are authoritative for the same DNS namespace.

Apparently it’s “how to monitor hardware status” week on vcloudnine.de.

I thought, everyone knows it, but I’m always being asked “Where’s the hardware status tab?”

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a protocol for monitoring and configuration of network-attached devices.

Okay, the headline of this blog post is a bit provocative.

By default, CentOS 6 comes with Python 2.6.

Over the last weeks, I’ve tried to improve the performance of my blog.

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of pre-defined processes and common practices (I try to avoid the word “best practice” when talking about ITIL) for the IT service management (ITSM).

The embedded DHCP server on AOS 7 and AOS 8 is a less known feature.

HPE StoreVirtual is a scale-out storage platform, that is designed to meet the needs of virtualized environments.

Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs are all the rage.

Manually assigning ports to VLANs can be a time consuming and error prone process.

This is not a specific problem of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) OmniSwitches, but I’m affected by this behaviour and it’s really, really annoying.

As any other environment, my lab needs some maintenance from time to time.

In December 2013, VMware made an christmas gift to the community by releasing pyVmomi. pyVmomi is a SDK that allows you to manage VMware ESXi and vCenter using Python and the VMware vSphere API.

In March 2016, HPE CEO Meg Whitman announced a ProLiant-based HCI solution, that should be easier to use and cheaper than Nutanix.

When I talk with companies about IT processes and IT service management (ITSM), ITIL seems to be the de facto standard for ITSM.

I’m not a developer.

Today a tweet from Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) has caught my attention: Don't waste money on automation without first looking at your processes. https://t.co/PWeFDbyQkb pic.twitter.com/7RvhmvS6GQ — Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) May 8, 2016 https://twitter…

Today I got an email from HPE, which has informed me of the imminent end of support for HPE Data Protector 7.0x 8.0x.

What is a problem?

Last year in December, I updated the first customer from HPE Data Protector 9.04 to 9.05.

Last week, I was surprisingly booked by a customer who observed a problem in his network.

The Virtual Environment Integration (VE Integration) provides protection of VMs in virtual server environments.

After updating my lab to VMware vSphere 6.0 U2, one of my hosts continuously thrown an error during an update scan.

I really like the idea behind Kanban.