There has been a lot of talk about Hyper-V in its 2012 editions. One of the questions that I hear on a regular basis is about which version of Hyper-V to use. Usually the conversation goes something like this.

“So Microsoft makes Hyper-V Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V?”

“Yes.”

“Hyper-V Server 2012 is a free download, right?”

“Right!”

“So why would I want to use Windows Server 2012 to get Hyper-V?”

The question is a good one, and it has a really good answer. Licensing! Here are the nitty gritty details. First this from the Microsoft Hyper-V Server2012 page;

“Hyper-V Server is a dedicated stand-alone product that contains the hypervisor, Windows Server driver model, virtualization capabilities, and ... Read more

Last year the development team at Veeam turned the backup and recovery of Microsoft Exchange database objects on its ear. What used to be a time-consuming and unwieldy process usually performed by a separate, complex, for purchase product has become a powerful, easy-to-use, free feature included in Veeam Backup & Replication. 

Today Veeam is disrupting the market again with the announcement of Veeam Explorer™ for Microsoft SharePoint. SharePoint databases, like Exchange databases, contain large numbers of shared files and folders that are used for a variety of business operations.

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Our customers love Veeam Backup & Replication! We get all kinds of positive comments about how easy it is to set up, configure, and operate. We hear about how powerful it is in backup and recovery operations. All of this goodness comes at a very affordable price point.

Powerful, Easy-to-Use, and Affordable. That’s Veeam!

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I have been a System Engineer for some years and one of the scariest traditions was Holiday Season patching. In short it means that a lot of companies still think its ok to keep the systems an entire year running and do ALL patches (firmware, OS, software) in the week between Christmas and New Year. More often than not that did not turn out to be the best experience as 'something' will break. I cannot recall a single holiday season that the patching projects went actually better than planned. What I do recall are the Christmas or New Year's eves that we were troubleshooting or recovering from previous versions.

So how can Veeam save your bacon?

There are 3 stages in the ... Read more

The Hyper-V component exists in three ways, and in fact this very situation was discussed at length with Hyper-V MVP Aidan Finn on a recent episode of the Veeam Community Podcast. The important thing to note is that Hyper-V can exist in three principle ways, described... Read more

Modern Architecture Wins Every Time: Veeam Customers Unaffected

Last week Symantec published a blog post scaring all VMware customers about backups on vSphere 5.1. In this post they made insinuations that backup vendors claiming support for vSphere 5.1 were misleading their customers and putting them into unsafe recoverability conditions. While we’d like to think that Symantec did this as a service to their customers, we believe this is just another example of a Symantec trying to use scare tactics against their biggest competitor, Veeam. We believe this creative FUD was created just to explain why Symantec still does not support the latest vSphere release – unlike Veeam which does support it.

Symantec went on a campaign to ... Read more

Veeam builds innovative software that helps a business to realize the promises of virtualization. Veeam’s products support virtual machines (vm’s) running in multiple hypervisor environments including VMware and Hyper-V. The changes and improvements to Windows Server 2012, particularly as they relate to Hyper-V, and to storage, are incredibly exciting! Let me give you a great example!

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Sometimes the easy things in life come along and make your day so much better. Recently I found a very easy way to edit .VMX files with Veeam Backup Free Edition. This technique was used before with FastSCP (now replaced by Veeam Backup Free Edition) with the FastSCP Editor. This editor is still available in Veeam Backup Free Edition (as well as the paid versions, of course) and makes editing .VMX files very easy!

While there are a number of reasons why you may want to edit the .VMX file, and because of such there are a few guidelines. First, don’t do this on a powered-on virtual machine, because it may cause unexpected behavior. Granular options like ... Read more

SAN snapshots are the fastest way to secure your data, especially if you are using offloading API's like VAAI. So since it is fast and the timeframe is small, some people want to use san snapshots as a backup procedure. There are a few issues here; the first issue is that if you want a longer retention, you will need to keep all your snapshots online and this will take too much precious production data in your tier1 storage array. The second issue is that a lot of SAN products today still don't like working full-time on top of nested snapshotted LUNs.

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I have the opportunity to work with some really smart people who do some really great things with technology. Steven Duckaert is a co worker and friend who is one of those IT guys who takes what is possible and makes it Reality! Recently I saw him do a demonstration of integrating Veeam Backup & Replication and System Center to automate VM recovery.  I asked him to write it up so I could put it on the Blog. The following post is what he wrote. It’s a great Post! Thanks Steven!

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