Boudewijn Plomp

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SkyKick Cloud Backup (for Office 365)

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I recently had the opportunity to implement a PoC (Proof-of-Concept) of SkyKick Cloud Backup for a customer. SkyKick Cloud Backup is an online backup service for Office 365. My experience so far; it is an absolute winner! The initial configuration took me no more than 5 minutes. After a backup is made; doing a single item restore is done in seconds!

So if you are looking for a backup solution for your Office 365 subscription; this is one of these online services that I can highly recommend. One more reason for me to share what it has to offer. I will also tell you how to get it, since this service is only available through Microsoft Partners. [Read more…]

My first FlexPod! (Part 6 – System Center)

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This is part 6 and also the last part of the following blog series:

If you haven’t read the previous part, then I recommend you read them. On the other hand this will be a short one, because there is not that much to tell. Although the title of this blog is about System Center I want to show you three topics.

Partner Ecosystem Software:

Cisco has a partner ecosystem with software for management of Cisco UCS. When you go to the Cisco support page you can download a lot of tools/add-ins. [Read more…]

My first FlexPod! (Part 5 – Hyper-V Cluster)

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This is part 5 of the following blog series:

I hope part 1, 2, 3 and 4 where informative to you. In this part it is time to talk about an actual Hyper-V Cluster on UCS Blade Servers. Hosting a Hyper-V Cluster on UCS is not rocket science. The deployment is just as straightforward as with other brands. The only difference is that you are (more) flexible with your network configuration and you have the benefits from stateless computing, if that is what you want.

In our case we had eight physical UCS B200 M3 Blade Servers available as specified in part 2. When you have pre-configured UCS Manager with all pools and policies that are required, you are ready to create a Server Profile. You can then assign the new Server Profile to a physical server (equipment), boot it and begin installing the Operating System. [Read more…]

Sender ID Framework (highly recommended)

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As we all know, e-mail is a very important part of our daily lives. At least, during our daily job. When we talk about e-mail it is clear that the number of SPAM messages is increasing. Apart from the fact that SPAM is annoying, it is also a potential threat. By means of SPAM; spoofing and phishing is often used to steal someone’s identity. It can harm the reputation of the domain owner. SPAM can also consumes unnecessary bandwidth and affect overall performance of a mail server.

Anti-SPAM:

Of course we often use Anti-SPAM filters. A disadvantage of Anti-SPAM is that it sometimes marks e-mail messages as SPAM while it isn’t, with the risk losing legitimate e-mail. And every now and then an unwanted SPAM message gets through. This is why we constantly have to be kept up-to-date with Anti-SPAM definitions. Fortunately, more and more is done in terms of legislation against SPAM. But the harder we fight against SPAM it will never solve the problem entirely.

If you zoom in on SPAM then there is something that is not so noticeable; it’s always the receiver that needs to protect themselves against SPAM. Right?

The fact is, the owner of a domain can definitely do something about it. A very good method is using the Sender ID Framework (SIDF). From my own experience, I can highly recommend Sender ID Framework! It is very easy to apply, and it is totally free. Unfortunately, the Sender ID Framework is somewhat underexposed. This is a shame, because it works very well. With this blog I hope to bring the Sender ID Framework to your attention. Are you an administrator of an e-mail server, are you responsible for inbound and outbound communication for you company or are you using e-mail in other way, then I highly recommend you to read this blog. [Read more…]

Troubleshoot NICs (left behind in registry)

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Symptoms:

At customers I have noticed that sometimes problems occur with network interfaces in Windows, either physical or virtual network interfaces. Having one or more of the following symptoms:

  • A static IP Address cannot be used because (accoring to Windows) it is already in use. But there is no sign of a NIC with that specific IP Address.
  • A static Default Gateway on the TCP/IP properties of your NIC is lost after reboot or directly after you apply the TCP/IP settings.
  • The label “Local Area Network 2” or “Ethernet 2” cannot be renamed to “Local Area Network” or “Ethernet” because (according to Windows) that name already exists.
  • A network interface is detected and shown in Device Manager as <interface-name> #2, whereas it is the only interface.

These symptoms occur when settings are left behind in the registry. Which is often caused by human error, incorrectly removing a NIC (Network Interface Card) interface, or using an OS image on another machine. Of course there is no one to blame, what seems so simple is sometimes overlooked. Troubleshooting these symptoms can take a lot of time. But in fact they are quit easy to solve. With this blog I hope to make you aware about what you should (not) do when removing or re-adding a NIC. And if you encounter such symptoms, how to solve it.  [Read more…]

My first FlexPod! (Part 1 – Introduction)

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This is part 1 of the following blog series:

Introduction:

Two years ago I had the opportunity to design, develop and implement a new public and private cloud infrastructure. Because we were going to host multiple customers (tenants) including our selves on a shared infrastructure this required a Secure Multi-Tenancy environment. As you may probably know, a Secure Multi-Tenancy environment brings a lot of challenges that you have to deal with. We were going to use Microsoft Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 R2 and SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager) 2012 R2 as the virtualization platform. Because it was going to be a private and public cloud service it required the right hardware that is highly scalable. At that time we looked at DELL, HP and Cisco for compute, network and storage. At the end we pulled the plug and chose for a Cisco FlexPod solution. And this is where it all started…

Well, I can tell you now; Cisco FlexPod is awesome! Now that we have our infrastructure running for about two years I am so enthusiastic about this system that is literally made a kind of career shift for me. I am not going totally for Cisco instead of Microsoft, but more a combination of both. As we would say, best of both worlds! And this already brought me a lot of new opportunity’s. Because I am so enthusiastic about a Cisco FlexPod (or better known as Cisco UCS with NetApp) I get a lot of questions from people around me. That’s why I decided to write this blog, to share my experience and hopefully make other people as enthusiastic as me. Did I just say the word ‘enthusiastic’ four times? 😉

If you are interested in this topic than I recommend you to read this blog. Please understand that there are so many things to write about and that I can’t go into too much detail on each topic. I have chosen only a few topics that might be interesting. You can expect more blogs from me that go into more technical detail. So, stay tuned… [Read more…]