On-Premise – Michael Paul

Skype for Business Server 2015 CU12 Released – Important Changes & Prerequisite Troubleshooting

Microsoft have released the CU12 cumulative update for Skype for Business Server 2015, and with it, some huge changes. In addition to the usual bug fixing, they’ve also taken the stance that they won’t be investing any further effort into the Skype for Business Online PowerShell module, instead you MUST use the Microsoft Teams PowerShell… Continue reading Skype for Business Server 2015 CU12 Released – Important Changes & Prerequisite Troubleshooting

Data Protection Best Practice: Encrypting Backups

Today I want to talk about backups, and the importance of encrypting them, everywhere. When people think of encrypted backups, the usual first thoughts are around portable backups such as tape and USB or backups outside of your trust domain such as cloud storage. This is a great starting point, and if you’re not currently… Continue reading Data Protection Best Practice: Encrypting Backups

Fix: AzureAD/Teams – Unable to Update SIPProxyAddress

I had an interesting issue over the past week that stumped Microsoft Support for a while. A customer of mine had created a user but accidentally left a trailing space after their UPN. When the user had synchronised to AzureAD with this attribute and their Microsoft 365 licensing had deployed, this created a SIPProxyAddress with… Continue reading Fix: AzureAD/Teams – Unable to Update SIPProxyAddress

Workaround: KB5005043 / Security Update August 2021 Won’t Install on Windows Server 2016

I’ve found a lot of clients are having the same issue with their Windows Server 2016 servers and getting KB5005043 to install. It seems that Microsoft might not be identifying this patch correctly as it doesn’t show within Windows Update for most and then downloading the patch manually from the Microsoft Catalog results in the… Continue reading Workaround: KB5005043 / Security Update August 2021 Won’t Install on Windows Server 2016

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010/2013/2016/2019 – Unable to connect to OWA/ECP “protectionCertificates.Length<1"

Microsoft have done it again, with another security update, they’ve broken a lot of environments, I wish there was a better communication method than finding a small footnote on a blog post that a patch was going to potentially break environments. Many organisations have automated patch workflows that end up catching people out when this… Continue reading Microsoft Exchange Server 2010/2013/2016/2019 – Unable to connect to OWA/ECP “protectionCertificates.Length<1"

Veeam Backup & Replication Monitoring Feature: Tape Drive Alerts

Hi, Everyday is a school day, and today I found out something really cool that Veeam was doing, that I never knew about because “It Just Works”. I had an alert generated from a customer system today that I had never seen before. Now I’ve seen plenty of alerts for different backup issues, whether they’re… Continue reading Veeam Backup & Replication Monitoring Feature: Tape Drive Alerts

VMware vSphere 6.5 – End of General Support Changes

Hey everyone! VMware released some unexpected news yesterday regarding the end of support for vSphere & vCenter 6.5 and vSAN 6.5 & 6.6. These were both originally intended to reach End of General Support (EoGS) this year, on the 15th November 2021. VMware are now extending this general support window to the 15th October 2022,… Continue reading VMware vSphere 6.5 – End of General Support Changes

RAM Acceleration: Optimising Aging Workloads at no cost!

Afternoon, This post covers a beneficial use case for RAM Acceleration (Read Caching). Please consider this post on RAM Acceleration only covers reads and only accelerates data that has already been previously loaded aka warm data.

Solving the Exchange C: Drive\ Resource Mystery

Now you may have had Exchange in your environment for a while, you may even have had a DAG in place. You followed your best practise guidance of not installing the application on the C drive yet somehow your C drive is growing at a much faster pace than any other servers. Sound familiar? Read on!