In Part 1, Protecting the Active Directory Domain Services – Best Practices for AD administration, I focused on protection steps to protect your domain service locally. Unfortunately, most environments have multiple locations, otherwise known as ROBOs (Remote Office Branch Offices). Examples include remote, colocation and cloud data centers, retail stores, satellite offices, distribution centers, manufacturing plants and more. These locations are often geographically separated by many hundreds or thousands of miles, require only simple file, print and share services and are often without an IT staff. Server virtualization has drastically improved the way these services are deployed.

In the Backup Modes in depth post we explained you the different modes that exist in Veeam Backup & Replication. In this post, we are going to dig a bit deeper on the File Level Backup method and explain the exclusions also.

This will be a rather short post, but it is certainly handy to know what your possibilities are.

Every component of the Modern Data Center requires authentication of some form or fashion.  Microsoft's Active Directory Services contains information about individual objects within the forest and stores the necessary information in a relational database (ntds.dit). Domain Controllers are the heads of the infrastructure that controls access to resources through an authentication and login process. When a user attempts to access a file on the corporate domain-based file server, either. Kerberos and NTLM are authentication protocols used to verify the identity of a computer or user. To say the least, authentication is critical to the Always-On Business.

When we released Veeam Explorer for SQL Server last year, I was very excited about this new Explorer. It truly addresses the database restore situation with ease for virtualized SQL Server systems running as a virtual machine (VM) on VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V without requiring the expertise of a SQL Server database administrator (DBA). In this blog post, I’ll focus on simply restoring a SQL Server database from a Veeam backup job.

There are three ways Veeam Explorer for SQL Server works to restore SQL Server databases: From the image-based backup restore point, from a log replay to point in time, and from a log replay to a specific transaction.

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE as the name implies is a free solution: you can download and install it at no cost. How about support?

Usually free product comes without support at all. We like to do more, even for a free product. Here at Veeam we value customer feedback and moreover it’s one of the main motivation factors to keep making best backup solutions.

Let’s make sure we are on the same page from the very beginning: free support is provided ‘at best effort’ which means there is no SLA like in regular support for our paid solutions.

Two weeks ago we’ve announced an upcoming Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE 1.1 and today I am very pleased to say it is general available! Be the first to upgrade your existing setup by downloading the newly released version from our website - and be rewarded with a number of new fancy features.

Last year I was tapped to spearhead a new project here at Veeam: launch a global influencer program. This honestly was something I was a bit timid about as I have no experience operating a program like this. I’ve happily been nominated as a VMware vExpert and a Cisco Champion for a number of years. Additionally on my team, Doug Hazelman, Luca Dell’Oca and Clint Wyckoff have been nominated as current and prior vExperts and Mike Resseler as a Microsoft MVP. We feel we have a good background on how these types of programs should operate and now we are happy to publically announce the Veeam Vanguard Program.

In previous posts we talked about recovery methods that can be used with Veeam Endpoint Backup. While discussing volume recovery we mentioned a few limitations and how these limitations can be avoided via Veeam Recovery Media. Let’s take a closer look at the Veeam Recovery Media and how to start the Bare Metal Recovery process.

The physical (and mental!) process of migrating from legacy to virtual can be sometimes a difficult job for admin because the virtual sphere terms and features are sometimes different from what was learned earlier. For those of you who are learning about the many aspects of virtualization and Hyper-V, we will continue to publish helpful posts that explain various Hyper-V features.