It’s 10 am on a Monday morning, and I’m sitting here in the classroom at the first Veeam Certified Engineer (in short, VMCE) training in Italy; with me, there are nine other IT techies, in front of our teacher and his slide deck.

“Wait, you at the Veeam Training Course?”

I know what you are thinking here. I am a long time and heavy Veeam Backup & Replication user, my first installation was at the time of the 3.0 version, and after many blog posts and whitepapers, I ended up being hired by Veeam and appointed as one of their "Evangelists”. So, I am supposed to be the one knowing everything, and instead of listening I should go around explaining what I ... Read more

There is one word that brings fear and exasperation to the hearts of IT Professionals everywhere. Licensing! The installation of every operating system and application comes with the required and totally ignored EULA. We all find ways not to read the EULA. A contract embedded in an installation program seems counterintuitive. Imagine how long an installation would take if you actually read the EULA. The ways and means with which licenses are issued and established in the IT world are as varied as imagination will allow. Creativity in licensing is so prevalent that there are certified licensing specialists who make their entire careers out of making licensing recommendations. Why does it have to be so hard? ... 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.

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.

Hyper-V is cool! Its technically sound and for all practical purposes has become an excellent choice for running infrastructure workloads in a virtual environment. Hyper-V is not just for test and development environments anymore. More and more businesses are relying on Hyper-V to run their production workloads like Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, and Active Directory. Production environments have strict operating requirements! Business relies on uptime and access!

So what if you were using Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 to run your Virtual Machines (VMs) and you have decided to make the move to Windows Server 2012 R2? How will you migrate those VMs? I get this question at least once a week so I decided to write the detailed answer.

For those ... Read more

Some of the best things in an admin’s life are indeed free, especially when it comes to backup and virtualization. Beyond star data-protection solutions and other must-have programs, there are quite a few free, yet no-less-powerful, backup tools out there.

In this article, I will consider Veeam Backup Free Edition, a handy-dandy backup tool for your Hyper-V VMs that will rock your world.

Data consistency is the sum of validity, accuracy, usability and integrity of data between applications and across an operating system. This is a critical characteristic of any backup solution. In this blog, I will discuss data consistency in more detail, define different levels of consistent backups and explain how to make sure that your Veeam backup is consistent.

Today, it’s hard to imagine a situation when data consistency doesn’t matter for a company. It always matters, especially when the data is being changed actively like in bank systems, simultaneously making thousands of financial transactions within an account database.

Over the last few years, virtualization has gained a lot of trust and many decided to virtualize Microsoft Exchange and other I\O intensive business apps. As a result, there have been many questions about the backup and recovery of those apps, including questions about what Veeam has to offer for such circumstances.

A VMware VM is a set of files containing all of the necessary information about a virtualized operating system. These files include the primary configuration file (.VMX), which keeps VM settings, the centralized file for storing information about VM snapshots (.VMSD) and other. The data of the VM is contained in the .VMDK file, the VMware virtual disk format. By way of analogy with physical servers, each VMware VM can have one or more virtual disks, which mean that your VM can contain several .VMDK files or otherwise said, can contain several “hard drives”.

In the virtualization and larger IT communities; one thing we all expect is change. That’s the case with 2013 here at Veeam. 2013 was an incredible year, with so much going on; it is very easy to have missed something along the way. Let’s take a look at the year in review here at Veeam.