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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How much is Hyper-V? Hmmm….. free is not really the right answer because you don’t technically “Buy” Hyper-V. In fact you can’t buy Hyper-V!

Microsoft has structured the delivery of its Hyper-V hypervisor in such a way as to have no impact on the bottom line software acquisition costs to an organization. Cha-Ching! Here’s how it works.

Hyper-V comes in several packaged forms. (None of which let you buy Hyper-V)

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While running a VM in Hyper-V, it is likely that you are also using all of the associated files (assuming, of course, that you are using snapshots). That said, it is important to understand that each virtual machine in Hyper-V has an association with its Hyper-V host: A GUID, which is how it is known and recognized on the Hyper-V host.

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If you have been following some of the Veeam promotional activity recently, it’s pretty clear that Veeam and Drobo have been hard at work with some joint solutions for their common customers. Drobo, makers of flexible, easy-to-use storage systems, have now teamed up with Veeam for to provide an additional resource for customers who make new Veeam and Drobo purchases. Drobo recently blogged about these promotions and now it’s our turn!

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