The Always-On Enterprise must ensure that its services comply with today’s new demands and challenges. Availability plays a central role here. In addition to common situations where a backup is needed (for example, when a user accidentally deletes data or a system cannot start after an update), more recent issues related to encryption-based Trojans also plague organizations today. While protecting backups against encryption-based Trojans was discussed earlier in this Veeam blog, many companies continue to look for solutions that deal, not only with backup protection, but also with disaster recovery (DR) scenarios.

I’m enjoying this series of blogs! This is a great way to share information about the best practices for the VMware backup experience. This post will now vary slightly from the other two and talk about the backup repository. This was another breakout session from Anton Gostev at VeeamON 2015 (those who attended were lucky to get the live experience) and will surely be a great one to catch in 2017 in New Orleans. This will be written in mind of Veeam Backup & Replication v9, but can be a starting point to making good changes in your environment.

Let’s face it, for an IT administrator, recovery is a big part of your world. Over the years, I’ve seen exhaustion and fatigue on the faces of IT staff struggling to recover their business applications and data after unplanned system disruptions. In the IT arena, ever-increasing demands and expectations are setting the bar higher, and fast recovery is a key to success.

Veeam’s deep integration with NetApp enables businesses to leverage storage snapshots to create application consistent backups to fast SAN/NAS based repositories. As a result, IT administrators avoid the pain, frustration and exhaustion often experienced when in “recovery mode.”

I recently blogged about the Veeam-Nimble integration configuration and recovery from Nimble Storage snapshots with Veeam. Today, let’s test backup and replication from Nimble snapshots with the Beta version of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5.

Veeam is extending its storage integration offerings to the support of Nimble Storage arrays in the upcoming Veeam Availability Suite 9.5. The Beta is already available for testing, and I used this chance to get first-hand experience. In this post, I’ll share insights from my experience and review the functional use cases delivered by this Veeam-Nimble Integration.

The Veeam-Nimble integration follows the same approach as Veeam’s existing integration capabilities with other enterprise storage solutions. It’s all about leveraging the underlying storage hardware and snapshot capability. The Veeam-Nimble integration offers the benefits of minimum impact on the virtual infrastructure during the backup process, RTPO of less than 15 minutes and verified recoverability.

We are now ready for the second post in this series, and we will now cover the VMware Backup Proxy. This is truly the workhorse of your backup infrastructure, so this will definitely be of interest to many readers!

When it comes to deciding what are can be considered “BEST” practices, a lot can be up for interpretation. One thing that we do know for sure is that when Gostev presented VT-466 VMware Backup Best Practices: 2015 Edition there was something for everyone to learn. This was without a doubt one of the most popular sessions from VeeamON 2014 and 2015, and I can’t wait to see what the 2017 edition will look like!

That being said, we’ve decided to release a few key points here in a blog series from this session from last year, to share the knowledge and ramp up for VeeamON 2017.

It’s a problem that’s continuing to plague organizations around the globe. For example, a large global organization was faced with recent outages of their end-user-facing, retail-sales application costing the company thousands of dollars. A mandate from the CIO placed the IT team in a position where they HAD to figure out how to centrally protect the applications and services at their remote office/branch offices (ROBOs), as well as their headquarters (HQ) datacenter.

It’s unfortunate, but this challenge is becoming more and more commonplace in the today’s virtualized datacenter. Senior executives are now demanding centralized, off-site backup AND replication of their many remote offices and datacenters to the HQ datacenter, or in some cases, to the public cloud.

If you are a System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) user, you must have heard already about the Microsoft Operations Manager Suite (OMS). Whether you are at an event, watching a webinar or reading online about this solution, the most asked question we get around OMS is whether you should keep investing in OpsMgr or start moving to OMS. Before I get to that point, let’s have a look at what OMS exactly is.