Sometimes you want to make a design of something.
A whiteboard is then very handy. In most cases you would to like to use Microsoft Visio.
But on my home pc I don’t have Visio. A free alternative is Excalidraw.
You can draw some thing cool like this: (This for Demo only has no function)
Installing Features on Demand through Powerschell contains a bug. You may see “failure to download files”, “cannot download”, or errors like “0x800F0954” or file not found.
To Solve that I created I powerschell script to run the install twice: featuresondemand.ps1
The VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Holodeck Toolkit is designed to provide a scalable, repeatable way to deploy nested Cloud Foundation hands-on environments directly on VMware ESXi hosts. These environments are ideal for multi-team hands on exercises exploring the capabilities of utilitizing VCF to deliver a Customer Managed VMware Cloud.
Delivering labs in a nested environment solves several challenges with delivering hands-on for a product like VCF, including:
Reduced hardware requirements: When operating in a physical environment, VCF requires four vSAN Ready Nodes for the management domain, and additional hosts for adding clusters or workload domains. In a nested environment, the same four to eight hosts are easily virtualized to run on a single ESXi host.
Self-contained services: The Holodeck Toolkit configuration provides common infrastructure services, such as NTP, DNS, AD, Certificate Services and DHCP within the environment, removing the need to rely on datacenter provided services during testing. Each environment needs a single external IP.
Isolated networking. The Holodeck Toolkit configuration removes the need for VLAN and BGP connections in the customer network early in the testing phase.
Isolation between environments. Each Holodeck deployment is completely self-contained. This avoids conflicts with existing network configurations and allows for the deployment of multiple nested environments on same hardware or datacenter with no concerns for overlap.
Multiple VCF deployments on a single VMware ESXi host with sufficient capacity. A typical VCF Standard Architecture deployment of four node management domain and four node VI workload domain, plus add on such as VMware vRealize Automation requires approximately 20 CPU cores, 512GB memory and 2.5TB disk.
Automation and repeatability. The deployment of nested VCF environments is almost completely hands-off, and easily repeatable using configuration files. A typical deployment takes less than 3 hours, with less than 15 min keyboard time.
Nested Environment Overview
The “VLC Holodeck Standard Main 1.3” configuration is a nested VMware Cloud Foundation configuration used as the baseline for several Private Cloud operation and consumption lab exercises created by the Cloud Foundation Technical Marketing team. The Holodeck standard “VLC-Holo-Site-1” is the primary configuration deployed. The optional VLC-Holo-Site-2 can be deployed at any time later within a Pod. VLC-Holo-Site-1 configuration matches the lab configuration in the VCF Hands-On Lab HOL-2246 and the nested configuration in the VCF Experience program run on the VMware Lab Platform.
Each Pod on a Holodeck deployment runs an identical nested configuration. A pod can be deployed with a standalone VLC-Holo-Site-1 configuration, or with both VLC-Holo-Site-1 and VLC-Holo-Site-2 configurations active. Separation of the pods and between sites within a pod is handled at the VMware vSphere Standard Switch (VSS) level. Each Holodeck pod connects to a unique VSS and Port Group per site. A VMware vSphere Port Group is configured on each VSS and configured as a VLAN trunk.
Components on the port group to use VLAN tagging to isolate communications between nested VLANs. This removes the need to have physical VLANs plumbed to the ESXi host to support nested labs.
When the Holo-Site-2 configuration is deployed it uses a second VSS and Port Group for isolation from Holo-Site-1
The VLC Holodeck configuration customizes the VCF Cloud Builder Virtual Machine to provide several support services within the pod to remove the requirement for specific customer side services. A Cloud Builder VM is deployed per Site to provide the following within the pod:
DNS (local to Site1 and Site2 within the pod, acts as forwarder)
NTP (local to Site1 and Site2 within the pod)
DHCP (local to Site1 and Site2 within the pod)
L3 TOR for vMotion, vSAN, Management, Host TEP and Edge TEP networks within each site
BGP peer from VLC Tier 0 NSX Application Virtual Network (AVN) Edge (Provides connectivity into NSX overlay networks from the lab console)
The figure below shows a logical view of the VLC-Holo-Site-1 configuration within a Holodeck Pod. The Site-1 configuration uses DNS domain vcf.sddc.lab.
Figure 1: Holodeck Nested Diagram
The Holodeck package also provides a preconfigured Photon OS VM, called “Holo-Router”, that functions as a virtualized router for the base environment. This VM allows for connecting the nested environment to the external world. The Holo-Router is configured to forward any Microsoft Remote Desktop (RDP) traffic to the nested jump host, known as the Holo-Console, which is deployed within the pod.
The user interface to the nested VCF environment is via a Windows Server 2019 “Holo-Console” virtual machine. Holo-Console provides a place to manage the internal nested environment like a system administrators desktop in a datacenter. Holo-Console is used to run the VLC package to deploy the nested VCF instance inside the pod. Holo-Console VM’s are deployed from a custom-built ISO that configures the following
Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Desktop Experience with:
Active directory domain “vcf.holo.lab”
DNS Forwarder to Cloud Builder
Certificate Server, Web Enrollment and VMware certificate template
RDP enabled
IP, Subnet, Gateway, DNS and VLAN configured for deployment as Holo-Console
Firewall and IE Enhanced security disabled
SDDC Commander custom desktop deployed
Additional software packages deployed and configured
Google Chrome with Holodeck bookmarks
VMware Tools
VMware PowerCLI
VMware PowerVCF
VMware Power Validated Solutions
PuTTY SSH client
VMware OVFtool
Additional software packages copied to Holo-Console for later use
VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 Cloud Builder OVA to C:\CloudBuilder
VCF Lab Constructor 4.5.1 with dual site Holodeck configuration
VLC-Holo-Site-1
VLC-Holo-Site-2
VMware vRealize Automation 8.10 Easy Installer
The figure below shows the virtual machines running on the physical ESXi host to deliver a Holodeck Pod called “Holo-A”. Notice an instance of Holo-Console, Holo-Router, Cloud Builder and four nested ESXi hosts. They all communicate over the VLC-A-PG Port Group
Figure 2: Holodeck Nested Hosts
Adding a second site adds an additional instance of Cloud Builder and additional nested ESXi hosts. VLC-Holo-Site-2 connects to the second internal leg of the Holo-Router on VLAN 20. Network access from the Holo-Console to VLC-Holo-Site-2 is via Holo-Router.
The figure below shows a logical view of the VLC-Holo-Site-2 configuration within a Holodeck Pod. The Site-2 configuration uses DNS domain vcf2.sddc.lab
Figure 3: Holodeck Site-2 Diagram
Accessing the Holodeck Environment
User access to the Holodeck pod is via the Holo-Console. Access to Holo-Console is available via two paths:
Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) connection to the external IP of the Holo-Router. Holo-Router is configured to forward all RDP traffic to the instance of Holo-Console inside the pod.
Good (One pod): Single ESXi host with 16 cores, 384gb memory and 2TB SSD/NVME
Better (Two pod): Single ESXi host with 32 cores, 768gb memory and 4TB SSD/NVME
Best (Four or more pods): Single ESXi host with 64+ cores, 2.0TB memory and 10TB SSD/NVME
ESXi Host Configuration:
vSphere 7.0U3
Virtual switch and port group configured with uplinks to customer network/internet
Supports stand alone, non vCenter Server managed host and single host cluster managed by a vCenter server instance
Multi host clusters are NOT supported
Holo-Build host
Windows 2019 host or VM with local access to ESXI hosts used for Holodeck + internet access to download software. (This package has been tested on Microsoft Windows Server 2019 only)
Microsoft announced the addition of the Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate certification to our portfolio, to be released in early December 2021. This new certification validates the skills of administrators working in hybrid environments.
Administrators in this role support their teams and organizations using Windows Server—both in the cloud and on-premises/
The Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate certification
In March 2020, Microsoft is going to release a update which will essentially disable the use of unsigned LDAP which will be the default. This means that you can no longer use bindings or services which binds to domain controllers over unsigned ldap on port 389. You can either use LDAPS over port 636 or using StartTLS on port 389 but it still requires that you addd a certificate to your domain controllers. This hardening can be done manually until the release of the security update that will enable these settings by default.
How to add signed LDAPS to your domain controllers
After the change the following features will be supported against Active Directory.
How will this affect my enviroment?
Clients that rely on unsigned SASL (Negotiate, Kerberos, NTLM, or Digest) LDAP binds or on LDAP simple binds over a non-SSL/TLS connection stop working after you make this configuration change. This also applies for 3.party solutions which rely on LDAP such as Citrix NetScaler/ADC or other Network appliances, Vault and or authentication mechanisms also rely on LDAP. If you haven’t fixed this it will stop working. This update will apply for all versions.
Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 10 1507, Windows Server 2016, Windows 10 1607, Windows 10 1703, Windows 10 1709, Windows 10 1803, Windows 10 1809, Windows Server 2019, Windows 10 1903, Windows 10 1909
How to check if something is using unsigned LDAP?
If the directory server is configured to reject unsigned SASL LDAP binds or LDAP simple binds over a non-SSL/TLS connection, the directory server will log a summary under eventid 2888 one time every 24 hours when such bind attempts occur. Microsoft advises administrators to enable LDAP channel binding and LDAP signing as soon as possible before March 2020 to find and fix any operating systems, applications or intermediate device compatibility issues in their environment.
A remote code execution vulnerability exists in Microsoft Exchange software when the software fails to properly handle objects in memory. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could run arbitrary code in the context of the System user. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts.
Exploitation of the vulnerability requires that a specially crafted email be sent to a vulnerable Exchange server.
The security update addresses the vulnerability by correcting how Microsoft Exchange handles objects in memory.
Download:
Product
Link
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 3 Update Rollup 21
The Windows Defender Browser Protection extension for Google Chrome allows you to add an additional layer of protection when browsing online, powered by the same trusted intelligence found in Microsoft Edge. The extension alerts you about known malicious links, and gives you a clear path back to safety.
VMware is announcing vSphere 6.7, the latest release of the industry-leading virtualization and cloud platform. vSphere 6.7 is the efficient and secure platform for hybrid clouds, fueling digital transformation by delivering simple and efficient management at scale, comprehensive built-in security, a universal application platform, and seamless hybrid cloud experience.
vSphere 6.7 delivers key capabilities to enable IT organizations address the following notable trends that are putting new demands on their IT infrastructure:
Explosive growth in quantity and variety of applications, from business critical apps to new intelligent workloads.
Rapid growth of hybrid cloud environments and use cases.
On-premises data centers growing and expanding globally, including at the Edge.
Security of infrastructure and applications attaining paramount importance.
Let’s take a look at some of the key capabilities in vSphere 6.7:
Simple and Efficient Management, at Scale
vSphere 6.7 builds on the technological innovation delivered by vSphere 6.5, and elevates the customer experience to an entirely new level. It provides exceptional management simplicity, operational efficiency, and faster time to market, all at scale.
vSphere 6.7 delivers an exceptional experience for the user with an enhancedvCenter Server Appliance (vCSA). It introduces several new APIs that improve the efficiency and experience to deploy vCenter, to deploy multiple vCenters based on a template, to make management of vCenter Server Appliance significantly easier, as well as for backup and restore. It also significantly simplifies the vCenter Server topology through vCenter with embedded platform services controller in enhanced linked mode, enabling customers to link multiple vCenters and have seamless visibility across the environment without the need for an external platform services controller or load balancers.
Moreover, with vSphere 6.7 vCSA delivers phenomenal performance improvements (all metrics compared at cluster scale limits, versus vSphere 6.5):
2X faster performance in vCenter operations per second
These performance improvements ensure a blazing fast experience for vSphere users, and deliver significant value, as well as time and cost savings in a variety of use cases, such as VDI, Scale-out apps, Big Data, HPC, DevOps, distributed cloud native apps, etc.
vSphere 6.7 improves efficiency at scale when updating ESXi hosts, significantly reducing maintenance time by eliminating one of two reboots normally required for major version upgrades (Single Reboot). In addition to that, vSphere Quick Boot is a new innovation that restarts the ESXi hypervisor without rebooting the physical host, skipping time-consuming hardware initialization.
Another key component that allows vSphere 6.7 to deliver a simplified and efficient experience is the graphical user interface itself. The HTML5-based vSphere Client provides a modern user interface experience that is both responsive and easy to use. With vSphere 6.7, it includes added functionality to support not only the typical workflows customers need but also other key functionality like managing NSX, vSAN, VUM as well as third-party components.
Comprehensive Built-In Security
vSphere 6.7 builds on the security capabilities in vSphere 6.5 and leverages its unique position as the hypervisor to offer comprehensive security that starts at the core, via an operationally simple policy-driven model.
vSphere 6.7 adds support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 hardware devices and also introduces Virtual TPM 2.0, significantly enhancing protection and assuring integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system. This capability helps prevent VMs and hosts from being tampered with, prevents the loading of unauthorized components and enables guest operating system security features security teams are asking for.
Data encryption was introduced with vSphere 6.5 and very well received. With vSphere 6.7, VM Encryption is further enhanced and more operationally simple to manage. vSphere 6.7 simplifies workflows for VM Encryption, designed to protect data at rest and in motion, making it as easy as a right-click while also increasing the security posture of encrypting the VM and giving the user a greater degree of control to protect against unauthorized data access.
vSphere 6.7 also enhances protection for data in motion by enabling encrypted vMotion across different vCenterinstances as well as versions, making it easy to securely conduct data center migrations, move data across a hybrid cloud environment (between on-premises and public cloud), or across geographically distributed data centers.
vSphere 6.7 introduces support for the entire range of Microsoft’s Virtualization Based Security technologies. This is a result of close collaboration between VMware and Microsoft to ensure Windows VMs on vSphere support in-guest security features while continuing to run performant and secure on the vSphere platform.
vSphere 6.7 delivers comprehensive built-in security and is the heart of a secure SDDC. It has deep integration and works seamlessly with other VMware products such as vSAN, NSX and vRealize Suite to provide a complete security model for the data center.
Universal Application Platform
vSphere 6.7 is a universal application platform that supports new workloads (including 3D Graphics, Big Data, HPC, Machine Learning, In-Memory, and Cloud-Native) as well as existing mission critical applications. It also supports and leverages some of the latest hardware innovations in the industry, delivering exceptional performance for a variety of workloads.
vSphere 6.7 further enhances the support and capabilities introduced for GPUs through VMware’s collaboration with Nvidia, by virtualizing Nvidia GPUs even for non-VDI and non-general-purpose-computing use cases such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and more. With enhancements to Nvidia GRID™ vGPU technology in vSphere 6.7, instead of having to power off workloads running on GPUs, customers can simply suspend and resume those VMs, allowing for better lifecycle management of the underlying host and significantly reducing disruption for end-users. VMware continues to invest in this area, with the goal of bringing the full vSphere experience to GPUs in future releases.
vSphere 6.7 continues to showcase VMware’s technological leadership and fruitful collaboration with our key partners by adding support for a key industry innovation poised to have a dramatic impact on the landscape, which is persistent memory. With vSphere Persistent Memory, customers using supported hardware modules, such as those available from Dell-EMC and HPE, can leverage them either as super-fast storage with high IOPS, or expose them to the guest operating system as non-volatile memory. This will significantly enhance performance of the OS as well as applications across a variety of use cases, making existing applications faster and more performant and enabling customers to create new high-performance applications that can leverage vSphere Persistent Memory.
Seamless Hybrid Cloud Experience
With the fast adoption of vSphere-based public clouds through VMware Cloud Provider Program partners, VMware Cloud on AWS, as well as other public cloud providers, VMware is committed to delivering a seamless hybrid cloud experience for customers.
vSphere 6.7 introduces vCenter Server Hybrid Linked Mode, which makes it easy and simple for customers to have unified visibility and manageability across an on-premises vSphere environment running on one version and a vSphere-based public cloud environment, such as VMware Cloud on AWS, running on a different version of vSphere. This ensures that the fast pace of innovation and introduction of new capabilities in vSphere-based public clouds does not force the customer to constantly update and upgrade their on-premises vSphere environment.
vSphere 6.7 also introduces Cross-Cloud Cold and Hot Migration, further enhancing the ease of management across and enabling a seamless and non-disruptive hybrid cloud experience for customers.
As virtual machines migrate between different data centers or from an on-premises data center to the cloud and back, they likely move across different CPU types. vSphere 6.7 delivers a new capability that is key for the hybrid cloud, called Per-VM EVC. Per-VM EVC enables the EVC (Enhanced vMotion Compatibility) mode to become an attribute of the VM rather than the specific processor generation it happens to be booted on in the cluster. This allows for seamless migration across different CPUs by persisting the EVC mode per-VM during migrations across clusters and during power cycles.
Previously, vSphere 6.0 introduced provisioning between vCenter instances. This is often called “cross-vCenter provisioning.” The use of two vCenter instances introduces the possibility that the instances are on different release versions. vSphere 6.7 enables customers to use different vCenter versions while allowing cross-vCenter, mixed-version provisioning operations (vMotion, Full Clone and cold migrate) to continue seamlessly. This is especially useful for customers leveraging VMware Cloud on AWS as part of their hybrid cloud.
Learn More
As the ideal, efficient, secure universal platform for hybrid cloud, supporting new and existing applications, serving the needs of IT and the business, vSphere 6.7 reinforces your investment in VMware. vSphere 6.7 is one of the core components of VMware’s SDDC and a fundamental building block of your cloud strategy. With vSphere 6.7, you can now run, manage, connect, and secure your applications in a common operating environment, across your hybrid cloud.
This article only touched upon the key highlights of this release, but there are many more new features. To learn more about vSphere 6.7, please see the following resources.
On March 20, 2018 Microsoft has released two new quarterly updates:
Exchange 2016 Cumulative Update 9 (CU9)
Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 20 (CU20)
TLS 1.2
There aren’t too many new features in these CUs. The most important ‘feature’ is that TLS 1.2 is now fully supported (most likely you already have TLS 1.2 only on your load balancer). This is extremely supported since Microsoft will support TLS 1.2 ONLY in Office 365 in the last quarter of this year (see the An Update on Office 365 Requiring TLS 1.2 Microsoft blog as well).
Dot.net Support
Support for .NET Framework 4.7.1, or the ongoing story about the .NET Framework. The .NET Framework 4.7.1 is fully supported by Exchange 2016 CU9 and Exchange 2013 CU20. Why is this important? For the upcoming CUs in three months (somewhere in June 2018) the .NET Framework 4.7.1 is mandatory, so you need these to be installed in order to install these upcoming CUs.
Please note that .NET Framework 4.7 is NOT supported!
If you are currently running an older CU of Exchange, for example Exchange 2013 CU12, you have to make an intermediate upgrade to Exchange 2013 CU15. Then upgrade to .NET Framework 4.6.2 and then upgrade to Exchange 2013 CU20. If you are running Exchange 2016 CU3 or CU4, you can upgrade to .NET Framework 4.6.2 and then upgrade to Exchange 2016 CU9.
Schema changes
If you are coming from a recent Exchange 2013 CU, there are no schema changes since the schema version (rangeUpper = 15312) hasn’t changed since Exchange 2013 CU7. However, since there can be changes in (for example) RBAC, it’s always a good practice to run the Setup.exe /PrepareAD command. For Exchange 2016, the schema version (rangeUpper = 15332) hasn’t changed since Exchange 2016 CU7.
As always, check the new CUs in your lab environment before installing into your production environment!!
Exchange Server 2013 enters the Extended Support phase of product lifecycle on April 10th, 2018. During Extended Support, products receive only updates defined as Critical consistent with the Security Update Guide. For Exchange Server 2013, critical updates will include any required product updates due to time zone definition changes.
The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), build 8450, is now available on the Microsoft Download Center. This update supports the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK) for Windows 10, version 1709, available on the Microsoft Hardware Dev Center(adksetup.exe file version 10.1.16299.15).
Here is a summary of the significant changes in this build of MDT:
Supported configuration updates
Windows ADK for Windows 10, version 1709
Windows 10, version 1709
Configuration Manager, version 1710
Quality updates (titles of bug fixes)
Win10 Sideloaded App dependencies and license not installed
CaptureOnly task sequence doesn’t allow capturing an image
Error received when starting an MDT task sequence: Invalid DeploymentType value “” specified. The deployment will not proceed
ZTIMoveStateStore looks for the state store folder in the wrong location causing it to fail to move it
xml contains a simple typo that caused undesirable behavior
Install Roles & Features doesn’t work for Windows Server 2016 IIS Management Console feature
Browsing for OS images in the upgrade task sequence does not work when using folders
MDT tool improperly provisions the TPM into a Reduced Functionality State (see KB 4018657 for more information)
Updates to ZTIGather chassis type detection logic
Upgrade OS step leaves behind SetupComplete.cmd, breaking future deployments
Includes updated Configuration Manager task sequence binaries
Figure 1: Holodeck Nested Diagram
vSphere 6.7 delivers an exceptional experience for the user with an enhancedvCenter Server Appliance (vCSA). It introduces several new APIs that improve the efficiency and experience to deploy vCenter, to deploy multiple vCenters based on a template, to make management of vCenter Server Appliance significantly easier, as well as for backup and restore. It also significantly simplifies the vCenter Server topology through vCenter with embedded platform services controller in enhanced linked mode, enabling customers to link multiple vCenters and have seamless visibility across the environment without the need for an external platform services controller or load balancers.
Another key component that allows vSphere 6.7 to deliver a simplified and efficient experience is the graphical user interface itself. The HTML5-based vSphere Client provides a modern user interface experience that is both responsive and easy to use. With vSphere 6.7, it includes added functionality to support not only the typical workflows customers need but also other key functionality like managing NSX, vSAN, VUM as well as third-party components.
vSphere 6.7 adds support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 hardware devices and also introduces Virtual TPM 2.0, significantly enhancing protection and assuring integrity for both the hypervisor and the guest operating system. This capability helps prevent VMs and hosts from being tampered with, prevents the loading of unauthorized components and enables guest operating system security features security teams are asking for.
vSphere 6.7 continues to showcase VMware’s technological leadership and fruitful collaboration with our key partners by adding support for a key industry innovation poised to have a dramatic impact on the landscape, which is persistent memory. With vSphere Persistent Memory, customers using supported hardware modules, such as those available from Dell-EMC and HPE, can leverage them either as super-fast storage with high IOPS, or expose them to the guest operating system as non-volatile memory. This will significantly enhance performance of the OS as well as applications across a variety of use cases, making existing applications faster and more performant and enabling customers to create new high-performance applications that can leverage vSphere Persistent Memory.
vSphere 6.7 also introduces Cross-Cloud Cold and Hot Migration, further enhancing the ease of management across and enabling a seamless and non-disruptive hybrid cloud experience for customers.
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