Apparently i am not the only one!

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/goatcase.com

And i can even see that their refund never happens either!

And seems like VMware has a lab for this http://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/catalog/all

Just search for palo alto

Surprisingly, I got the refund message now from paypal (dont be confused about my payment, that was on my bank card but i guess they used paypal to refund back!) that the amount will be credit back to my account! and a cancellation of the order via email!

Got it. Let me get the pricing tomorrow from vendors on Synology, and see how this goes. But this post was worth, got couple of things cleared and learned something new. Thank you @scottalanmiller

Congrats!

tomorrow would be quite a lot of calls to vendors on pricing!

And done!

This is the second time since yesterday I am posting in the wrong section.

Mods, can someone please move this to IT?

Sorry!

Working on my home lab again after a long break! Testing Microsoft Admin Center, interesting to see all management capability on a web interface including hyper-v management. Setup new VM on Hyper-v using that and installing CentOS (for graylog)

Lets assume this is a one time job for a client, I would assume the tools would be:

BPA for the corresponding MS product
Lynis for Linux security Audit
For exchange, points mentioned by @Breffni-Potter
AD- tools suggested by @thecreativeone91
OpenVAS or Nexpose or Nessus or GFI Languard
MBSA
Sydi for network documentation

Not sure on a one time audit, if we can use some sort of log management

I am thinking of trying blinkist, anyone using it and is it worth moving from audible to blinkist?

Thanks @MattSpeller I would be getting a Gigabit switch and cabling. its just less than 10 PCs for now. Once the base is setup, we have plans to expand. And for food, in the PH the best thing is beer! So people used to come and sit for hours for both beer+internet/gaming

My desk now!

Sharegate's blog is an excellent resources if you are working on SP or O365 http://en.share-gate.com/blog

Yes, I am thinking of using the MAC server as file server mainly due to the fact that almost all users are on MAC. Plus the storage is around 2 TB and growing, so mini might not be an option. In this case Drobo 5D would be a good choice?

Based on my requirement, Drobo also gave me the option for 5D

I have a SP 2013 dev server which has AD,SP & SQL in one on my local machine and wanted to move to Azure. As per the documenation https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-create-upload-vhd-windows-server/ I did sysprep, uploaded the vhd file to azure and created image based on the uploaded file and started the machine.

It showed that sucessfully created virtual machine but stuck in progress.Provisioning the virtual machine

Its been almost an hour its stuck, cant RDP yet. When i read about this on some forums it says you can't do sysprep on DC.

Anyone faced this issue, and how can i fix this?

One of my clients has an office with around 25 users. 3 years back, I was asked to setup a server with central file sharing and permissions and had limited budget. So I setup one Windows server with AD and file sharing. Data being backed up to crash plan and works well, several situations CP helped them to recover deleted files Works fine till this time, but few things that they want to improve and sort few issues.

Few weeks back, they called me saying no one can access the network drive/server. Upon checking found that the server's on board network card got fried! Replaced with an additional card and things started working again.

Before I go further, let me give you some details about their office.

The office is in a warehouse, almost in the middle of desert, so very dusty, hot and during winter/rain water can come in to the office, so kept the server in the first floor to avoid any damage due to water. Other issues they have are sudden power spike & failures, had blown out their fridge, washing machines and PCs. (I had an APC tower UPS for the server with spike guard so the server was protected till now, seems like that's not functioning very well now) On top of this, their internet connection cable comes through a man hole which sometimes gets filled with water, damaging the cable, and ISP comes and fixes it once in a while. No option to get alternate ISP there, tried USB dongle wifi, doesnt cater to their usage.

Sounds like a perfect setup NOT to have an office there but they currently don't have any choice! May be they will be able to move out to a new office next year, but for now this is it.

Now, they've asked me to setup a fail proof solution to make sure that even if one server stops working, they want to continue to work. The obvious answer was to setup an additional DC and move this data to a network drive (DROBO!). One thing they didn't wanted to spend a lot on storage now, as its almost end of the year, but they are not completely ignoring it.

Even with a network drive, they fear of that device getting damaged, with DROBO, i have the drive protection but wondering if they have any enclosure warranty/ may be with an additional charge, get an enclosure on call to be replaced in case this goes bad.

Other option i am thinking of is to have the second server, add internal hdds on that and may be do a sync between the server1 and server 2 for data. So if one goes down the other can take over, and data can be served from there.

I also suggested them a hybrid option, may be have the data synced to an online solution, so the users can switch to that if the server is not working, but again since the internet is not very reliable, this might not be the best solution.

What are the best options to give them a cost effective and fail proof solutions in this case?

Seems like Azure Powershell is playing! Just after I posted the above note, it started uploading.

So as per MS nested Hyper-V is not supported by Azure as well, but one blog post says this is coming soon. In this case idea of using datacenter edition on Azure and using its HyperV is out of question, unless there are other things which I am not aware of