Today we’re happy to announce general availability of Veeam Backup & Replication Add-on for Kaseya! The first release is available now for download at the Veeam website.

Veeam Backup & Replication Add-on for Kaseya is completely FREE and intended for service providers (and IT departments) who use Kaseya VSA to manage IT environments remotely and at the same time use Veeam Backup & Replication to protect vSphere and Hyper-V VMs.

Below, I’ve tried to answer the most common questions about the add-on, describe its key features and more.

Read more

I have five performance tips to help you make sure you’ve done everything right to optimally configure Veeam Backup & Replication with Microsoft Hyper-V so they work better together!

Read more

I am sure that many of you by now heard or read about the Heartbleed bug that has been in the IT news for a few days now. The Heartbleed bug is a serious vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This is a very popular used network software that many companies and services on the internet use for encrypting their services. Websites & online services such as Facebook, Tumblr, Google, Yahoo, Gmail, Yahoo mail,  Amazon web services, GoDaddy and many more use the affected OpenSSL version and therefore are sensitive for this bug.

Luckily it seems that the bug was discovered by security teams before malicious hackers were able to exploit this but ... Read more

 When I think about NetApp, the first word that comes to my mind is Snapshot. And if you work in virtualization or storage, or both, snapshots are the foundations of many solutions we all use every day.

NetApp is no doubt one of the major players in the storage world, and one of its best and most known feature is its snapshot technology. Efficient, space saving, with basically no impact on production workloads, NetApp users have always relied on this technology to protect their data. The power of NetApp have always been in its software: the ONTAP operating system offers a full-featured storage platform, and the snapshot technology is the starting point for more ... Read more

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.

Read more

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!

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more