If anyone here would like to be a part of the Office 365 panel, we still have some open spots. Feel free to contact me if interested.

Date: Tuesday, Sep 12
Time: 6:30pm - 9:30pm CDT
Location:
Hardie's Fruit & Vegetable Co
1005 N Cockrell Hill Rd
Dallas, TX 75211

It's time once again to get together with fellow Spiceheads for an evening of learning and networking. This will be an unsponsored meeting, so it will be members of the group sharing their stories from the field. The topics for this meeting came together based on conversations had at a previous meeting. Here's what we have in the lineup:

How I Use Google G Suite for My Business
Hang onto your hats for a deep dive on the features and functionality of Google G Suite presented by Ray Hicks, Greg Carreon, and Chris Lambert.

Office 365 Panel Discussion
Join us for a panel discussion on Microsoft Office 365's various offerings, how these compare to Google's offerings, and some common pitfalls in implementation to avoid.

We will be in the main conference room. Feel free to bring your own food and beverage to the meeting as none will be provided.

We hope to see you there. Remember to bring your questions, and come ready to learn something new! RSVP here - https://community.spiceworks.com/meeting/show/2498.

@minion-queen said in Witnessing Sexual Harassment:

I would notify HR ASAP!! Do it on her behalf. If you witness something like this always report it. As a woman I would avoid reporting things like this because, it would cause problems for me to be the one to report etc.

I'd call the copier company and ask to speak to the Sales Manager (hopefully not the guy who came to visit you) or that company's HR department. Then tell the person what happened.

Did you ever fail at something really important to you? What motivated you to keep going? I'd like to share the story of some recent failures and what I learned from them.

I recently had a flashback to my days as a high school math teacher. Every once in a while I would have a student tell me he / she spent a lot of time studying for a test and somehow managed to not perform well. I used to ask them what and how they studied. After all, I would hand out a sheet with a list of topics covered on the test and have a question and answer session over those topics in the class before the test to help everyone know what was expected.

I realize now I became that student who put in time and energy and still failed. And it didn’t just happen to me once. It happened twice. I hope this glimpse into my experience will help someone understand that failure, though completely debilitating at times, can be our greatest teacher.

You can read the rest of the article here - http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2017/08/13/learning-from-failure-and-the-third-try-vcp-dcv-6-delta/

@jimmy9008 said in Using In-Memory Databases, Anyone?:

@networknerd said in Using In-Memory Databases, Anyone?:

• They actually point out in the podcast that they had the best success with in-memory databases on local storage or SAN (NAS not a good choice) and that ethernet was the networking avenue of choice.

Not sure what this means... not that I know about this, but, if its in memory, its in... memory, right? So, what does it have to do with local storage, SAN, or NAS?

Anyway, other databases load what is used frequently in to memory so its quick to access. Its why lots of places would build an SQL server with a ton of RAM - so that SQL can put what is used often in to RAM (fast) and keep it available... right?

Well, at some point you do have to write the data to disk (whether synchronously or asynchronously) to keep a less volatile copy of the data (at least that is what I remember from the podcast). It seems like synchronous data writes would be near impossible because you cannot keep it going at the same speed.

I definitely do not claim to understand it all really well.

I have been listening to the Datanauts podcast quite a bit lately. One of the most interesting episodes was on on in-memory databases (http://packetpushers.net/podcast/podcasts/datanauts-085-understanding-memory-databases/). They specifically talked about Apache Geode on the show, mentioning that a 110 second transaction on an in-memory database was the equivalent to 115 days on spinning disk and 10 hours on SSDs.

I have a few questions:

• Has anyone seen this used in the wild?

• Are the techniques for running databases in memory that Geode uses similar to those that SQL Server utilizes for tables you can select to run in memory? I have never had the license to turn on that specific SQL feature but always wondered about it.

• They actually point out in the podcast that they had the best success with in-memory databases on local storage or SAN (NAS not a good choice) and that ethernet was the networking avenue of choice.

I would love to hear anyone's thoughts on this topic because I find it fascinating.

@donaldlandru said in Trend Micro OfficeScan Renewal Coming Up - Replacements?:

@scottalanmiller said in Trend Micro OfficeScan Renewal Coming Up - Replacements?:

Webroot is still my go to choice for third party AV.

You have a preferred vendor to buy Webroot through?

We had really good pricing from SHI when I was in charge of IT Purchasing at my last company.

@wrx7m said in Trend Micro OfficeScan Renewal Coming Up - Replacements?:

@scottalanmiller Which of these are you using/recommending? I assume endpoint protection but what about the network and internet-related ones?

I agree with Scott that Webroot really has a great product. It's super light weight on clients too but really effective. They have added several features it seems since the SpiceCorps we had last year where @Nic presented on all the new features.

Is the Internet / File / Mobile stuff like a buffet where you pick the features you want? The web classification and reputation looks helpful. I had heard them talking about adding web filtering but was not sure what that would become. The real-time anti-phishing could be mighty helpful if you have no IPS / IDS.

And don't inspect SIP traffic, turn off SIP-ALG, etc. Many times that leads to one-way audio and heartache.

I'd also make sure if you're passing network connection through a phone to a computer, make sure you have gigabit passthrough and not 10/100. It's worth the slight extra cost if you're looking to avoid dropping another ethernet jack in each person's cube.

I'd edit that to say use traffic shaping at the gateway to prioritize egress traffic. If you are afraid you might already be saturating switches on your internal network (which hopefully you aren't), many switches have traffic shaping built in to prioritize the VOIP traffic. I've never needed to activate it on my LAN to have VOIP work well.

We are using hosted Exchange through O365. When we migrated away from hosted Exchange 2007 earlier in the year, we did not turn on password synchronization and AD Connect (don't want to go into the back story).  Now we're working to configure Azure AD Connect for password sync, password writeback, and for single sign-on (no federation).

In house we're operating on AD functional level 2012 R2 with recycle bin enabled.  We have Azure AD Connect installed on a Server 2012 R2 VM.  I'm not doing the Express install because we only want to synchronize certain OUs (only one specifically to start testing).What's interesting to me is that if we run through the custom configuration and don't enable single sign-on (just password sync and password writeback), everything works as expected.  But if we select the option to enable single sign-on, we're met with the following error at the end of the configuration wizard:

Whether we reboot the server, restart services, or run AD Connect again, there is no getting past the error.  Looking in the logs, here's what we found:

[ERROR] Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
Exception Data (Raw): System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
  at Microsoft.Online.Deployment.PSModule.Tasks.DesktopSso.EnableDesktopSsoTask1.SyncDssoSecrets(IDesktopSsoProvider dssoProvider)   at Microsoft.Online.Deployment.PSModule.Tasks.DesktopSso.EnableDesktopSsoTask1.Execute()
  at Microsoft.Online.Deployment.Framework.Workflow.WorkflowTask.ExecuteWrapper()
[14:08:11.540] [ 28] [INFO ] ConfigureSyncEngineStage.StartADSyncConfiguration: AADConnectResult.Status=Failed

Even though this happened, accounts and passwords were indeed synchronizing to Azure AD as expected.  The only way I could get around the issue so we could actually launch AD Connect at a later time and make changes to its configuration was by completely uninstalling AD Connect and then re-installing without selecting the single sign-on option.Has anyone else run into this issue?  When I did testing on a dummy domain a couple of months ago, I had no issues with the single sign-on functionality working as expected or with Azure AD Connect in general.

If your vCenter config is not terribly complicated, you could just deploy a new appliance. But I can certainly see how that would not be too fun.

@coliver said in Migrating vCenter 6.5 on windows to appliance:

Looks like you're correct.

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2017/01/vcenter-server-appliance-6-5-migration-walkthrough.html

I thought I had read that you could move from 6.5 -> 6.5.

Yep, there's no horizontal migration option at the moment. But, you can see this is being worked on by a hackathon team at VMworld this year - https://blogs.vmware.com/code/2017/08/09/vmworld-hackathon-check-team-leads/.

@stacksofplates said in Using Meetup.com?:

I just joined a few weeks ago. Not a ton in my area but doing a RedHat thing this month.

Definitely post back here with feedback if you don't mind.

Does anyone out there use meetup.com and go to specialized user groups (i.e. for containers, programming languages, open source technologies, industry specific tech)? I was just curious how helpful those groups have been for you and how often they usually meet.

Hopefully this isn't posted elsewhere. Do we have any stats on number of attendees in 2016 vs. 2017 as well as number of vendors and session count? I was just curious since I wasn't able to attend either year.

What do you do when one of your most critical applications isn’t supported by your backup vendor? Do you find a new backup vendor, change applications, figure out a different solution, or cry silently in the fetal position on the server room floor? This, like any other problem, needed a solution, and this post is to share that solution with others. Keep reading.

The Problem

We had just deployed a 2-node Hytrust KeyControl v4.0-11538 cluster for use with VM Encryption (vCenter 6.5d, all ESXi hosts at 6.5d). Each cluster node was running as a VM with one node inside a vSphere cluster and one node outside. Everything worked great…except for backups using Rapid Recovery. Since Hytrust runs a very customized version of FreeBSD 32-bit, we were not able to install the Rapid Recovery agent on either node. Even if we could have installed the agent, Rapid Recovery does not support FreeBSD as an operating system on which their agent will run. I had hoped we would still be able to backup at least one node agentlessly via the vSphere APIs for Data Protection, but Rapid Recovery does not support agentless backups of operating systems not supported by the agent per this article.

At this point, 3rd party backup with Rapid Recovery was ruled out completely. And maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. That’s what I kept telling myself anyway.

You can read the rest of the story here - http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2017/08/01/hytrust-configuration-backups-with-powershell-rest-api-calls/.

I didn't see anyone post this, but 6.5 U1 is officially released as of the other day:
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2017/07/vsphere-6-5-update-1-hood.html.

The most helpful thing I see in this version is that we now have a way forward if you're running vCenter 6.0 U3. Now you can avoid the pain described here - http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2017/05/05/tales-of-a-vcenter-upgrade-gone-wrong-journey-to-vsan-6-6/.

Why else should you care? There are some neat changes to vSAN (6.6.1 released as part of this) that you can read about here:
https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2017/07/28/vsan-6-6-1-vum-integration/
https://blogs.vmware.com/virtualblocks/2017/07/27/introducing-hci-powered-by-vsan-6-6-1/

If you're in the area and not at MangoCon, come out to SpiceCorps sponsored by Arctic Wolf. I'm excited to see what they have to show us. Maybe I'll see you there!

https://community.spiceworks.com/meeting/show/2461