• Hi Clive,
    I hear your frustration and I’m sorry that you’re caught up in Microsoft’s focus on the cloud and neglect of on-premises products. I didn’t know about the rebuilding of the search index not working, very poor showing from Microsoft.
    /Paul

  • Azure Sentinel—A real-world example

    NetBIOS was initially created to allow applications to communicate without understanding the details of the network, including error recovery. It operates at the session layer, layer 5 of the OSI model. As with other legacy technologies, the main reason for disabling NetBIOS is security. There are two ways to achieve this goal: via either DHCP or a registry key.

  • Deploying Windows Hello for Business

    Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) has been around since the mid-90s and is one of the leading cryptographic hash algorithms used to secure digital resources. The initial standard (SHA-1) has now been around long enough that hackers know its weak points and can exploit systems secured with this hash algorithm. Therefore, it is time for organizations to migrate away from SHA-1 in favor of SHA-2.

  • Hi Jack,

    There's no tie in to DAGs specifically BUT the Preferred Architecture assumes that you're using clusters and DAGs (after all, you don't want a single failed server to bring down your entire Exchange environment). 

    I'm not really sure what the NVMe disk will give you in this scenario, as mentioned, Microsoft assumes individual (non-RAID) HDDs for storage of your mailbox databases and the SSD for caching is "icing on the cake". 

    Or put another way – are you or your users seeing degraded performance today? You've got some sweet SSDs there – they'll be LOT faster than HDDs. 

    Hope that helps,

    Paul

  • Hi Jack,

    Glad you liked the article.
    It depends, not so much on the size of the databases, but on the number of physical HDDs that underlies them. How many drives do you have? Are they just plain drives (not RAID) as the Preferred Architecture specifies?
    The recommendation is one SSD per three HDDs so that’ll be your design point.
    Having said that, I don’t know whether you’d get better performance if you just introduced a single SSD, I don’t have a system of your size to test that.
    Let us know about the number of drives,

    Paul

  • Azure Purview: Data governance for on-premises, multicloud, and SaaS data

    Troubleshooting physical hard drive issues can be difficult. Windows Admin Center System Insights provides new physical disk anomaly detection that uses predictive analysis to pinpoint physical hard drive issues.

  • The risk of fake OAuth apps in Microsoft 365 and Azure

    In this post, I will explain how you can easily change the IP configuration for a server’s NIC from manual (or static or fixed) to a DHCP reservation. If you have to scale the procedure with many servers involved, you can automate the task with PowerShell.

  • Azure Sentinel: Microsoft's SIEM for the cloud and on-premises

    Due to the modest innovations of Windows 10 20H2, this version only introduces a few additional GPO settings. The preliminary security baseline documents four new settings, but in fact there are more. The focus is on options for data protection. After a long absence, the reference is again available as an Excel spreadsheet.

  • Microsoft Cloud App Security

    We continue to cover VMware VCP7 certification exam objectives for vSphere 7 datacenter virtualization—the VCP-DCV 2020. This exam is the most important exam for every datacenter admin, as this certification was named one of the best virtualization certifications for IT Pros. VCP7-DCV would have been the logical name for this certification; however, VMware changed the denominations to VCP-DCV 2020 to make it easier to recognize how current this certification is and during which year it was passed.

  • Microsoft 365 Defender: An overview of Microsoft's security services

    The Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) includes its own Linux kernel and is able to run numerous programs natively for the open-source OS. It therefore makes sense to use this environment for web development and to install Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

  • Hi William, 

    Thanks for the feedback, which I agree with. 

    Many small and medium businesses won't look beyond a built in capability like this and for a small investment in effort they'll increase their security a great deal. But yes, if you're a large enterprise or you need very specific security functionality there are third party services available. 

     

    Cheers,

    Paul

  • Hi Matt,

    Thanks for the kind words and I'm very glad to hear that it worked out for your org. It really makes sense but it always takes time to change "best practise truths" that have been around for a long time. 

  • Block bad passwords in Azure Active Directory and Active Directory

    Microsoft 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) is an important layer of protection for email. It works as a sort of safety layer for those harmful elements that manage to trickle through the Exchange Online Protection (EOP) layer. Hence, a proper understanding of the various options of O365 ATP is crucial.

  • Hi Allan, 
    Interesting observation, I think it depends on what's happening at the time. If I'm presenting and conveying theory information, yes I agree with you. But there are many times in modern learning when it's less about "the lecture" and more about facilitating exploration and learning by the students themselves. And certainly in this part of a learning experience (in a physical classroom) I do want the learners to interact amongst themselves, many times students have experience and skills to contribute to the overall learning and I'd like to replicate that experience in a virtual classroom. 

    Hope that makes sense,

    Paul

  • Virtual training in the age of COVID-19

    A DHCP server is a critical component of the IT infrastructure in most environments. In addition to monitoring, which ensures the basic availability of the service, you may also want to check the status of the IP scopes or leases. PowerShell provides several cmdlets for this purpose.

  • Hi Ron,
    Thanks for your feedback – I was expecting some comments on this piece and you really didn't disappoint. 

    I agree with your points regarding the issues around Microsoft's Windows 10 releases, although I would point out that more recent releases have had improved quality and less issues. I think Microsoft does work hard to learn from their mistakes. 

    As for using the same approach internally in a business I can understand your concerns. I would mention that you don't have to take every Windows 10 release, especially if you're on the fall releases you can stick with it for up to 30 months, which would give you longer to do more comprehensive testing of all business applications. For what it's worth I upgrade my client's Windows 10 installations every 12 months, with some testing of their most important applications but not comprehensive testing of every app, but then again I work in SMB and not enterprises. 

    And finally, I do agree that Microsoft's decision to get rid of their testers in hindsight probably wasn't the best decision they could have made. 

    Overall though I do think there needs to be a balance between the IT department's desktop management approach from 10-20 years ago (what I call the "Stalin school of IT") which is very regimented, very locked down and providing no flexibility for end users and the YOLO world of upgrading to every new release with no testing at all. Somewhere in-between (and it'll be different for every business) is where I think a modern IT department needs to be to help the business be more effective with their IT infrastructure investments. 

    Just my two cents 🙂

  • Microsoft Modern Desktop

    VMware vSphere 7.0 and ESXi 7.0 raised the requirements when it comes to CPU and CPU compatibility. As with any major version of ESXi, there are new CPUs that are supported as well as old CPUs that are reaching the end of support.

  • Wow, a celebrity (Cameron Fuller) is commenting on my nine year old article :-). This is a good day for me. Anyway I agree – no serial No gathered. 

  • Altaro VM Backup 8: Reliable and easy-to-configure backup for Hyper-V and VMware

    One of the biggest limitations of Microsoft 365 Business (formerly Office 365 Business) is that you cannot control Word, Excel, & Co. via Group Policy Objects (GPOs). This means you cannot configure the settings for macros centrally. As a workaround, you can use Group Policy Preferences (GPP) to set the corresponding registry keys.

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