Regardless of how you view the 2012 update, it’s true that added functionality might be not used by you at 100%. Mike Resseler, MVP and Veeam Product Strategy Specialist, discusses the capacity of Windows Server 2012 features and concludes from his personal experience that many admins don’t realize how much power they have in their hands.

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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

Introduction

In our final part of this blog series we are taking managing and monitoring with System Center to the next level.

For those who have missed the previous posts, here are the links:

Part 1: Management PacksPart 2: Pre-work & Importing Management PacksPart 3: Exploring discoveriesPart 4: Fine-tuning methodologiesPart 5: Pro-active monitoring & maintenance tasks

In part 6, we are going to take it one step further and start creating our own dedicated views to make our work even easier.

Setting the scene

The Veeam Management Pack for System Center already has fantastic views in it, but sometimes you ... Read more

Mike Resseler and Maria Levkina continue the series by leading you through hands-on technical demos for managing the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2012 R2. You install the Hyper-V role to enable the native Microsoft virtualization technology built into Windows Server.

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Introduction

In our next part of this blog series we are going to talk about proactive monitoring and maintenance tasks.

For those who have missed the previous posts, here are the links:

Part 1: Management PacksPart 2: Pre-work & Importing Management PacksPart 3: Exploring discoveriesPart 4: Fine-tuning methodologies

In many cases actions are taken when the environment already has an issue and end-users are suffering from an outage. However, System Center Operations Manager and more specifically our Management Pack is written around pro-active monitoring. Instead of the traditional fire-fighting that happens in many environments, you can use the different MPs ... 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

Introduction

In part 1 of these series we talked about MPs and in part 2 we did our preparations, imported an MP and created an override MP. In part 3 we explored the discoveries.

Now that we understand the discoveries, we can start by looking at various other parts of the management packs. One of them will become very crucial and that is overriding monitors and rules. Overriding doesn’t mean disabling or enabling alone. It can also mean adapting the default thresholds so that they match your infrastructure better.

There are different ways of doing this or starting with this. I have seen different people ... Read more

Introduction

In part 1 of these series we talked about MPs and in part 2 we did our preparations, imported an MP and created an override MP. So now we are ready for the next steps… Investigating the discoveries…

What? I want to fine-tune now…

While I can perfectly understand that, I always believed it is better to start looking at the discoveries first to understand what exactly is being discovered in your environment. If you know what is being discovered, you will also make it much easier for yourself to understand what is being monitored and when alerts arrive, how you can address them.

Many MPs have a very thorough manual that includes the discoveries ... Read more