Along with the new functionality of Windows Server 2016, another essential element of any domain administrator — Active Directory — has been updated with some very important and great features. One of the updates that aims to improve the environment’s protection against external and internal threats to accounts is called privileged access management (PAM). This functionality is based on the idea of Just Enough Administration (JEA), which is a security technology that allows the delegation of administration rights with the help of PowerShell. Read more

From time to time, we need to test something in our infrastructure. Production is not good idea for this, so we build a test environment. Sometimes, such tests may require changes in the hypervisor, which we want to avoid in the production. In such cases, we can work on dedicated test hardware or we can virtualize. Virtualization nesting can be helpful for development, getting familiar with new technologies, new product versions or learning purposes where we can easily simulate our production environment. In this article, we'll explore how to build the test environment on different platforms with help of nested virtualization. Read more

It’s no secret that data management is an important part of a system administrator’s agenda. We are constantly looking to implement technologies and services that allow us to manage information flow better and let us store data efficiently without eating up our budget. There are many ways to achieve that but today I wanted to talk about one special example — Data Deduplication technology. Read more

Server uptime defines high Availability, there’s no denial of that. To ensure that all the critical services are available for customers, you need to provide a near-continuous uptime of your infrastructure. Inability to do so will result in a downtime that will cost you real money. But that’s not the only application of an uptime measurement. Read on to learn how you can create server uptime reports that will help you to improve your infrastructure. Read more

We introduced Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory — a very helpful utility when it comes to AD objects recovery — as a part of Veeam Backup & Replication v8. Its initial functionality was intended to solve the most frequent cases administrators have with Active Directory: Granular objects and containers recovery (ok, password recovery also was included, as well as AD data export in LDIFDE format). All of that made a lot of people happy, but, as always, they wanted more. The community gave us great feedback, asking for additional features for less frequent cases or specific scenarios.

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Best practices are guidelines you follow when deploying a system and want everything to work smoothly. But what about worst practices, those common mistakes and errors that inexperienced IT admin make when deploying or configuring a system? Here, I’ll discuss worst backup practices and how NOT to configure your virtual infrastructure’s backup solution with Veeam. Read more

In the part 1 of the Nano Server Deployment series we've created a new nano server image and now we'll learn how to deploy it on a physical server. Read more

Thin provisioning is the process of making a host think it has more available storage capacity than it actually has by allocating the needed disk space on demand. This mechanism uses storage space more efficiently and helps prevent against the wasting of resources on reservations that could never be used. Let's explore the details of this feature and how it operates on the virtual and physical levels! Read more

The ransomware threat is real and it’s much more than just a PC problem. Here at Veeam, we see customers and partners encounter ransomware in a number of situations including the data center. One important part of being resilient to ransomware is being able to recover from backups. That’s the Availability you want when things don’t go as planned, should ransomware become an issue in your data center. Here are a number of tips I’ve prepared to incorporate into your designs, both new designs and existing designs using Veeam. Not using Veeam yet? No worries, you can take this advice and implement it accordingly.

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Here’s a true story from one of our customers. A gas explosion resulted in a major power failure downtown, which in turn left the company’s primary data center offline for a week. This is a classic example of an IT Disaster – unexpected and unpredictable, disrupting business continuity and affecting Always-On operations. We can only imagine how much it could cost that company to stay offline for a week (as much as losing their business, I’d say), if they didn’t have a reliable disaster recovery (DR) plan and an Availability solution to execute this plan.

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