In this article, I am going to discuss what is Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and virtual machine (VM) snapshot, and how they can make Hyper-V data protection more reliable. However it’s not recommended to use snapshots as a primary data protection method, and I am going to briefly explain why and for what purposes snapshots were initially designed. I will also define what’s backup in relation to snapshot, what is replica, and why it’s efficient to use them in combination. Read more

When a small company decides to virtualize its servers on the basis of Microsoft Hyper-V and consolidate them on fewer physical machines, one of the first questions is, “Which edition of Windows Server 2012 R2 is best for us?”

Despite the availability of a wide range of editions of Windows Server 2012 R2, from the licensing point of view, it’s best to discuss only three of them: Standard, Datacenter and the free Microsoft Hyper-V Server, because only these three editions offer virtualization.

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote “3 Easy Steps to Migrate to Hyper-V 2012 R2” talking about how to migrate VM’s from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012 R2. Since then I keep hearing the same question over and over again.

Question: When you migrate VMs from Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 to Hyper V in Windows Server 2012 R2 can you also automate conversion from .vhd to .vhdx? And can it be done with minimum interruption to the operation of the workload of the VM?

Answer: YES!

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Today Veeam announces Veeam Explorer for Active Directory! Veeam Explorer for Active Directory is a valuable and innovative extension for Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam Explorer for Active Directory will allow you to browse the backup of an NTDS.DIT database to locate containers, objects, and their attributes and then restore them to their original location in the running domain controller or to a new location.

In the good old days, like yesterday, Active Directory recovery demanded the downtime associated with restoring the VM that hosted the Active Directory Domain Controller and then using active directory restore mode to recover containers, objects, and their attributes. Unfortunately some attributes such as passwords were problematic or downright impossible to ... Read more

I hope this never happens to you, but if you ever receive a legal discovery request, you may find this post useful. One of my IT friends shared this story of when he had to do an exchange discovery for a set of keyword combinations on historical email communications that he thought might have happened 2 years ago. This kind of discovery would be a real challenge for a lot of IT organizations.

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I get this question a lot, so much so that it’s time I blogged it! In particular, if someone has used other backup products which may take different approaches there can be questions on how Veeam gets the job done. While there are a lot of scenarios that Hyper-V can be used and deployed, I thought I’d take the time in this blog post to give a quick breakdown of the sequence of events for a Hyper-V backup job. Let’s break them down into several simple steps.

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Hyper-V is cool! Its technically sound and for all practical purposes has become an excellent choice for running infrastructure workloads in a virtual environment. Hyper-V is not just for test and development environments anymore. More and more businesses are relying on Hyper-V to run their production workloads like Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, and Active Directory. Production environments have strict operating requirements! Business relies on uptime and access!

So what if you were using Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 to run your Virtual Machines (VMs) and you have decided to make the move to Windows Server 2012 R2? How will you migrate those VMs? I get this question at least once a week so I decided to write the detailed answer.

For those ... Read more

Some of the best things in an admin’s life are indeed free, especially when it comes to backup and virtualization. Beyond star data-protection solutions and other must-have programs, there are quite a few free, yet no-less-powerful, backup tools out there.

In this article, I will consider Veeam Backup Free Edition, a handy-dandy backup tool for your Hyper-V VMs that will rock your world.

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Data consistency is the sum of validity, accuracy, usability and integrity of data between applications and across an operating system. This is a critical characteristic of any backup solution. In this blog, I will discuss data consistency in more detail, define different levels of consistent backups and explain how to make sure that your Veeam backup is consistent.

Today, it’s hard to imagine a situation when data consistency doesn’t matter for a company. It always matters, especially when the data is being changed actively like in bank systems, simultaneously making thousands of financial transactions within an account database.

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Over the last few years, virtualization has gained a lot of trust and many decided to virtualize Microsoft Exchange and other I\O intensive business apps. As a result, there have been many questions about the backup and recovery of those apps, including questions about what Veeam has to offer for such circumstances.

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