Many things have changed in the way we use technology since Windows 7 was released. The key trigger for these changes is the end-users — an office worker, an IT admin, the mobile workforce or someone from management who needs to always be connected, from anywhere with any kind of device. Windows 10 was built around the end-user's needs and it offers more personal interactions on a variety of devices — PCs, smartphones, tablets or even Xbox One. Windows 10 Enterprise brings more to device management and security through the new features and enables organizations to have better control of their mobile and interconnected workforce. Read more

This is the 3^rd article from my Active Directory protection series. In the previous one, I covered the domain controller recovery process. However, I believe that is a less common operation when compared to other Active Directory requests system administrators constantly receive. Among those requests, I believe the most frequent is Active Directory objects change.

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The best things about virtual computing are its ease of scale, management, portability and consolidation Virtualization also presents unique challenges for the IT team members who ask the following questions:

• • How do I monitor this constantly evolving and changing environment?
• • What metrics are the most important?
• • Do we keep using the legacy tools we're used using?
• • Do I procure something that's purposely built for the virtual infrastructure (VI)?
• • Like most IT decisions, there are pros and cons to each approach, but what if we took a bit of a hybrid approach?
• • What if the VI could be monitored and reported on within an existing toolset?

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The For Dummies series from Wiley has been helping millions of people learn the basics of a wide variety of subjects. This time, Veeam and Wiley Brand have teamed up to create DRaaS For Dummies, a book which covers the basics of Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).

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Today’s business relies on the IT department more than ever. The Internet of Everything (IoE) now requires a fully functioning datacenter to avoid business grinding to a halt, products not reaching the market and services disappearing. It is impossible to meet all user, customer or partner expectations without a fully functioning datacenter, which is the driving force for organizations to modernize and optimize their IT resources.

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This blog post will wrap up the series and focus on completing the Rolling Cluster OS Upgrade process from the previous post by adding in the necessary details required to upgrade the cluster Functional Level and upgrade the VM Hardware Version. Read more

This is the second article from my series on Active Directory (AD) protection with Veeam. In the previous post, I reviewed physical and virtual Domain Controller (DC) backup procedures. Today, I will discuss recovery procedures. Read more

This Part 2 blog post explains the exact steps you’ll need to take to get your Hyper-V Cluster updated. Keep in mind that within Technical Preview 5, both Hyper-V and Scale-Out File Server Clusters are able to perform Cluster OS Rolling Upgrades. Read more

Throughout the course of this blog series, I will focus on helping you get Windows Server 2016 and Hyper-V 2016 up and running in an environment as quickly as possible. This first post discusses obtaining the installation media and performing a bare-metal, plain operating system installation. Next, I will graduate up to more complex activities such as how to leverage zero downtime and the rolling cluster installation option. The goal of this multi-part blog series is to arm you with the necessary tools and knowledge to take full advantage of Windows Server 2016 when the GA occurs. Read more

Microsoft Active Directory is a standard in corporate environments where authentication and central user-management are required. It’s almost impossible to imagine how system administrators would be able to do their jobs effectively if this technology didn’t exist. Not only is Active Directory a great power, but it's also a great responsibility — and it requires spending a lot of time with it in order to maximize its capabilities. Read more