Rescanning ESXi storage in a parallel way

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of work provisioning and decommissioning LUNs on some Fibre Channel arrays. As you all know, this process can be somewhat tedious when provisioning a new LUN on vSphere or removing said LUN. In the past, I would always use this PowerCLI command Get-VMhost -Cluster "Cluster1" | Get-VMHostStorage -Refresh This would first get all the ESXi hosts in the cluster “Cluster1” and then launch the refresh cmdlet on each host....

13 December, 2018 · 2 min · Maarten Van Driessen

ERROR: The host returns esxupdate error code:15

Today I was preparing some updates with VUM on Lenovo servers running vSphere 6.0. Things did not go as expected. While staging the patches I was greeted with this error. ERROR: The host returns esxupdate error code:15. The package manager transactions is not successful. Check the update Manager log files and esxupdate.log files for more details. Looking into the esxupdate.log file I could find the following entries: 2018-10-08T08:23:18Z esxupdate: 31744883: BootBankInstaller....

11 October, 2018 · 2 min · Maarten Van Driessen

Event ID 1000 rundll32.exe_aepdu.dll

While doing my morning check of our monitoring system I came across a strange issue…Two of our servers had been unavailable during the night, this had also happened the night before. Time to dig a bit deeper! Both servers are domain controllers running Server 2012 R2, no updates were installed in the last few weeks and nothing had been changed either. Pulling up the event log of both servers, I found the exact same event logged on both machines at the time they were unavailable to our monitoring system....

10 July, 2018 · 2 min · Maarten Van Driessen

Quick post: Bug in Veeam Quick Migration

Last week I was moving some VMs for a client using Veeam Quick Migration. During the migration, I happened to stumble upon some strange behavior. The source VMs make up an Oracle RAC cluster, using shared VMDKs. One of the requirements for setting up shared VMDKs, using the multi-writer option, is that they are thick eager zeroed disks. When the VMs got to the other side, they wouldn’t boot. I figured something went wrong during the migration so I tried it again....

20 September, 2017 · 2 min · Maarten Van Driessen

Publicly share Office 365 room calendar

A customer asked me if it was possible to have a room mailbox automatically accept meeting requests from external parties. They would also like to publish the calendar of that specific room publicly. Accept meetings from external parties Let’s start with the first question. By default, resource mailboxes only accept requests from internal senders. As you might guess, you can’t change this behavior through the GUI, Powershell to the rescue!...

7 April, 2017 · 3 min · Maarten Van Driessen

Cannot get extent connection. Failed to restore file from local backup

When I got into the office this morning, I noticed that on particular copy job hadn’t done its` job over the weekend. This particular job copies the daily restore points to a separate scale-out repository and enforces the GFS scheme that’s been set. The job report displayed Not that much to go on if you ask me. First, I checked to see if all extents in the repository still had enough room, this was the case....

6 March, 2017 · 1 min · Maarten Van Driessen

Deleting an Office 365 mailbox in hybrid deployment

When running Office 365 in a hybrid deployment, it is possible to have a mailbox both on premises as on Office 365. This can happen when you assign the user an Exchange Online license before the mailbox has been migrated to Office 365. If the user’s outlook is still configured to use the on-premises mailbox, this can create some funky issues. For example, sent items will be in the on-premises mailbox but new items will arrive in Office 365....

20 November, 2016 · 2 min · Maarten Van Driessen

How to grant access to deleted user’s Onedrive for Business library

A couple of weeks ago we had an issue which resulted in some users getting deleted from Office 365. Because of a sync tool we use, we had to recreate the user accounts instead of restoring them. As a result of this (different SID), the new users also got a new Onedrive for Business library and could no longer access their existing library. Listing all disabled user profiles In the Office 365 admin center, go to the SharePoint admin center and click User profiles and Manage User Profiles....

8 November, 2016 · 2 min · Maarten Van Driessen

Get exclusions for all Veeam jobs

This will be another short one, but I figured someone else will have run into this. While I was doing a rework for a Veeam implementation, I noticed on several jobs that there were exclusions set inside the jobs. I wanted a list of all jobs with their respective exclusions, time for Powershell! The script starts by getting a list of all Veeam jobs. Next, it will go through all jobs and look for objects that have the type “Exclude” set....

10 October, 2016 · 1 min · Maarten Van Driessen

Remove Logs

A couple of our web servers were running into some issues with disk space. Turns out the logs weren’t being cleaned up properly. In order to remediate this, I wrote a function that can be reused anywhere. The function accepts 3 parameters: FilePath: The directory where you want to remove the logs from CutOff; Specifies the age (in days) that a file must have before being deleted. LogPath; This parameter specifies the directory where you want the CSV log file....

6 September, 2016 · 3 min · Maarten Van Driessen