This article is aimed at giving you a smooth start with Veeam Backup & Replication. It includes some basic advice on the initial setup, and outlines the most common misconfigurations that we, at Veeam Support, find in clients’ infrastructures during our investigations. Read more

A lot of discussion and thought goes into designing backup solutions for adequate capacity, performance at an affordable cost. Normally the focus is on the backups, but we also need to think about the restores. The faster the restore, the less down time and economical loss. Instant VM Recovery is there to achieve the fastest possible restore time. This works great, but at scale, you need to worry about the performance of those virtual machines you made available so quickly and how the operations involved impact your environment. Let's continue our discussion of some key design considerations to make Instant VM Recovery shine. Read more

A lot of discussion and thought goes into designing backup solutions for adequate capacity, performance at an affordable cost. Normally the focus is on the backups, but we also need to think about the restores. The faster the restore, the less down time and economical loss. Instant VM Recovery is there to achieve the fastest possible restore time. This works great, but at scale, you need to worry about the performance of those virtual machines you made available so quickly and how the operations involved impact your environment. We’ll discuss some key design considerations to make Instant VM Recovery shine. Read more

It seems like it’s almost every day that the news reports another major company outage and as a result, the massive operational, financial and reputational consequences experienced, both short- and long-term. Widespread systemic outages first come to mind when considering disasters and threats to business and IT service continuity. But oftentimes, it’s the overlooked, “smaller” threats that regularly occur. Human error, equipment failure, power outages, malicious threats and data corruption can too bring an entire organization to a complete standstill.

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One of the most popular choices for backup archival is tape. It is cheap, reliable and offers protection against crypto viruses and hacker attacks. Additionally, it’s offline when not in a tape loader. With Veeam, IT administrators can use flexible options to create copies of backups and store them on a different media, following the 3-2-1 Rule for the backup and disaster recovery. This blog post provides advice and considerations that will help you create a robust tape archival infrastructure. Read more

Windows Deployment Services (WDS) is a great addition to the Windows product set. Out of the box, it’s able to deploy Windows VMs, and with a couple of small tweaks, it’s possible to have WDS build Linux and VMware servers, all from a selectable Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) boot menu. In order for it to deploy Windows and Linux systems it requires some changes which we'll explore in this article. Read more

I have been asked a lot about how to configure time in your domain when all the Domain Controllers (DCs) are virtual and running on Microsoft Hyper-V. People will say just stick to a physical DC. However, sometimes this is not an option. In this article, I am going to walk you through the best way to set up time synchronization. Read more

PowerShell has come a long way from a command line interpreter with support of a few commands, to a fully integrated part of every modern Windows OS. Right now, not only is it a cool thing to, but it is also essential in order to achieve better results in Windows tasks’ management, including virtual machine (VM) backup.

This is a two-part article. In the first part, I’m going to talk about PowerShell in general, when you should consider using it for Hyper-V backup and how to get acquainted with PowerShell basics, PowerShell commands (cmdlets) and syntax.

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When Windows Server 2016 was released, Microsoft brought us a new feature I personally have been waiting for since I first started with Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2. That feature is Virtual Machine Start Ordering. Virtual Machine Start Ordering enables us to make dependencies between VMs or Groups of VMs to make sure that they start in the correct order. Read more

Hello from Veeam Support!

Recently, a customer contacted us with the very curious case. The SureBackup job was failing with the generic error message during snapshot creation phase: “The specified feature is not supported by this version.” There were several VMs included in the SureBackup job, but only one specific VM failed. Moreover, the source backup job itself worked perfectly, including the affected VM.

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