Having a clear picture of what VM snapshots and backups can do for you is critical when your data is at stake. To dispel any doubts, snapshots are NOT backups. They are two different processes designed to address different needs. Today, I’m going to explain the discrepancy between VM snapshots and backups and provide you with a few scenarios where each of them best fits.

While it is true that many Veeam products will use a snapshot as part of a backup — a snapshot by itself is not a backup. This logic applies to VMware VM snapshots, Hyper-V checkpoints and storage snapshots as well.

Monitoring data center performance is an essential part of every IT administrator’s job that shouldn’t be overlooked. There are many avenues you can go down when looking at a tool to help monitor performance, but with Veeam, you can do this with Veeam ONE. Veeam ONE has many capabilities, but one of the most important features is the alarm it triggers when part of your virtual environment isn’t working as it should. Pre-built alarms included in Veeam ONE keep IT administrators up-to-date on the operations and issues occurring in their environment in real-time.

A few years ago, the file exclusion engine was introduced to Veeam Backup & Replication. This was primarily meant to handle situations such as a large set file data that you didn’t need in an image-based backup. One example I had users liked was a SQL Server (especially before Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server) that had SQL Server DBAs performing SQL Server Agent jobs or SQL Server Maintenance Plans to export flat backups on disk and transaction log exports.

This is the beginning of a series of blogs that will give you an in-depth how-to of the many new capabilities that are available in Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0.

If this is the first time you are hearing about our new product, I recommend you first review the following announcement blog post where I have previously provided an overview of the three editions of Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and some of the new functionalities. In this blog post, we will take a deeper look at some of the top features this release brings.

The backup infrastructure is a primary target for attack because all relevant environment data is stored in that one single place. Second, if an attacker wants to destroy data, the backup environment is a good starting point because the backup server has access to pretty much every other important system, such as virtualization platform or storage systems.

Happy 2017 SysAdmin Appreciation Day! Today, we celebrate YOU, the unsung heroes of organizations around the world.

Each year on the last Friday of July, we honor system administrators everywhere. We are grateful for stable internet connections, working printers and fast computers. We have grown to expect these tools to always be up and running, day or night. And most of the time they are, thanks to our amazing colleagues in the IT department. System administrators don’t always get the appreciation they deserve, but today, we officially want to say thank you.

To celebrate this important day, we’ve prepared some cool assets for you, so keep reading!

Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is starting to disrupt traditional storage markets (SAN, NAS + DAS) as enterprise IT begins to replicate Hyperscale public cloud provider’s infrastructure. Public cloud giants such as AWS and Microsoft Azure have developed their own scale-out, software-defined enterprise storage built on commodity servers and disks. Adding the enterprise features from existing SAN and NAS devices into software allows the use of commodity hardware while shifting the storage directly to the host to improve performance and scalability. The storage is provided directly by the host. The storage is scaled-out, as are the compute resources, providing a truly scalable and cost-effective solution.

You most likely know that Veeam leverages storage integration with (Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Nimble Storage, NetApp, Dell EMC and Cisco HyperFlex to provide Backup from Storage Snapshots capability, which helps reduce the impact on the production data and performance due to data protection activity. You may also know that Veeam can also provide backup from a secondary storage array to reduce impact on the production environment even further with Nimble Storage and NetApp. And as an Alliance Systems Engineer in charge of HPE, I often get the following question from HPE technical field people: “Why don’t you support this with 3PAR?” Well, we do!

Last week, Veeam released the beta version of the new Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 1.5. It promises a significant improvement over the previous version, starting from easier usability, better performance and improved scalability — all designed for service providers in mind. As usual, I took the new version for an early test run, and we wish to share with you what I found.

vSphere 6.5 has been generally available for several months now with the first release date being October 2016. Not everyone was excited to jump straight onto the vSphere 6.5 bandwagon though and for good reason. There were product interoperability issues at launch (I’m looking at you NSX), not to mention it is typically expected for companies to wait until the first major update package is released to make sure issues have been ironed out. However, a lot of the frustrations experienced by early adopters seem to have been resolved in minor patch updates to ESXi and to the vCenter server platform.