You may think that VM sprawl has never been a problem for your infrastructure, but what if it IS a problem and you just aren’t aware of it?

VM sprawl is a symptom of any rapidly growing virtual infrastructure. When any given department in the company opts to run their specific applications on dedicated servers, they can do this, thanks to virtualization. VMs are often set up for temporary usage, like testing or development labs, and after some peak usage owners may forget about them. The more virtualized applications and workloads you have, the more likely that “virtual junk” will appear in your infrastructure and cause VM sprawl.

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Virtualization is famous not just because of easier management of backup and restore procedures compared to those for physical systems. It has other advantages and one of them is definitely high availability (HA) of VMs. The term means that VM should be available regardless of the availability that the physical host it is running at. There are some specific methods for ensuring HA of the VM. Specifically, I’d like to talk today about failover clustering, which is Microsoft’s native feature for Windows Server with a Hyper-V role and MS Windows’ Hyper-V Server. Read more

When we released Veeam Backup & Replication version 6, one of the big “what’s new” items was our enterprise scalability through our distributed architecture and automatic intelligent load balancing. The move to the proxy/repository architecture was a big one for us because previously all backup activities ran through a single backup server. There were several reasons for moving to this architecture…

Distribute backup processing across multiple proxy servers to make it easier for you to scale your B&R deploymentAchieve higher availability and redundancy: if a proxy goes down, another one can still complete the task – no more single point of failureReduce impact from backups on production infrastructure through intelligent load balancingDramatically simplify job scheduling (by automatically controlling the desired tasks ... Read more

I’ve seen lately many requests in our forums, and I personally received some, about how to generate and manage SSL certificates on Windows Machines. It seems one of those topics that is always hot, especially these days with all the services available over public internet connections, and all the scary stories about security breaches.

Whatever “web” service you are willing to execute and publish over internet, an SSL certificate can protect you as a provider, and your users connecting to it. It’s extremely important to deploy properly configured SSL certificates, yet many don’t do this. Why? Maybe because only Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Services) has an easy wizard to accomplish these tasks. But if you follow this quick tutorial, SSL certificate ... Read more

Hyper-V replica was introduced in Windows Server 2012 as a new feature for Hyper-V environments. It has great potential and is very helpful in virtualized systems. If you are looking for an introduction to Hyper-V replica and want to learn more details, keep reading. I’m going to present the 5 most important things to know about Hyper-V replica. Read more

It turns out the answer for that question is not as easy as you may think. It absolutely depends on the Hyper-V environment you have. Shared storage, failover cluster, Windows Server version number — everything should be taken into consideration. The combination of those factors can be tricky, but it’s essential and the only way to find out the truth. Let’s have a quick look at some options. Read more

Read these helpful tips on Windows Server 2012 R2 licensing and installation from Maria Levkina, co-author of the popular show "Introduction to Virtualization". Read more

To back up, or not to back up? That is the question. What do you back up on your Hyper-V hosts, if anything? This came to me from a discussion on Spiceworks recently. The original topic was a different matter, but the challenge I raised was that the Hyper-V host itself doesn’t need to be backed up, if you do Hyper-V well. As an important side note, definitely back up the VMs! You can use Veeam for that, it just works!

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They say there are always three sides to every story, and this one is no exception.

The first one is personal. If you ever worked for a software company, you know there is no better reward than seeing a new solution going into the market, after you were involved in its creation, at any level. Even if you are not a programmer, like I am not, there are many ways you can contribute to the creation process. One year ago I was still working for a Veeam partner and customer, and I suggested on the Veeam forums a new idea. It was August 2013, so I was invited by Veeam to meet and talk about it during the upcoming VMworld.

Fast forward ... Read more

When it comes to a major release, we focus a lot on new features that solve real problems that customers have today. One of the features I’m personally excited about with v8 is support for EMC Data Domain Boost. There are a number of benefits when using EMC Data Domain Boost with Veeam Availability Suite™ v8, let’s take a tour through those benefits.

Faster backups!

By integrating EMC Data Domain Boost with backup jobs in v8, we can leverage advanced source side deduplication to avoid sending data already stored on Data Domain storage, as well as create new full backup files without physically moving data into the file, but rather by synthesizing them from the ... Read more