In the previous article, Mike went over the most exciting new features of Hyper-V 2016 TP4 at the time. However, since its Technical Preview stages it went through some changes and not every feature made it to the GA in its initial form or intended way. Windows Server 2016 has been fully available since the end of 2016 and there were some features left out in the article that are still interesting and quite important. Read more

The backup infrastructure is a primary target for attack because all relevant environment data is stored in that one single place. Second, if an attacker wants to destroy data, the backup environment is a good starting point because the backup server has access to pretty much every other important system, such as virtualization platform or storage systems.

Read more

Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is starting to disrupt traditional storage markets (SAN, NAS + DAS) as enterprise IT begins to replicate Hyperscale public cloud provider’s infrastructure. Public cloud giants such as AWS and Microsoft Azure have developed their own scale-out, software-defined enterprise storage built on commodity servers and disks. Adding the enterprise features from existing SAN and NAS devices into software allows the use of commodity hardware while shifting the storage directly to the host to improve performance and scalability. The storage is provided directly by the host. The storage is scaled-out, as are the compute resources, providing a truly scalable and cost-effective solution.

Read more

You most likely know that Veeam leverages storage integration with (Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Nimble Storage, NetApp, Dell EMC and Cisco HyperFlex to provide Backup from Storage Snapshots capability, which helps reduce the impact on the production data and performance due to data protection activity. You may also know that Veeam can also provide backup from a secondary storage array to reduce impact on the production environment even further with Nimble Storage and NetApp. And as an Alliance Systems Engineer in charge of HPE, I often get the following question from HPE technical field people: “Why don’t you support this with 3PAR?” Well, we do!

Read more

Previously, we’ve set up a Windows Server 2016 in Core mode with Hyper-V role and prepared it to host VMs. On this blog post, we will discuss the Veeam Backup & Replication deployment and configuration process. After preparing the Hyper-V server running on a Windows Server 2016, Veeam Backup & Replication can be deployed on either virtual or physical machines that will be up to these specifications. Read more

Today’s highway robber is a lot more sophisticated and savvy. They take far less risk and turn to the latest technology to extort you out of your money by threatening your valuables. In this case your data, your technology and most probably your computing ability.

Of course, I’m talking now about ransomware, the threat that’s been in the news almost every day for the past couple of months. The tool of choice for the modern highway robber has become headline news around the world with variants such as WannaCry and the more recent Popcorn Time. Organizations around the world have been affected by this ransomware, from the UK National Health Service, through to the Russian Postal Service in the last few ... Read more

Complete visibility within the data center is essential to keeping businesses available 24.7.365. Visibility into the data center allows IT administrators to properly utilize resources, be proactive in troubleshooting issues and run reports on their environment. Veeam allows businesses to remain proactive in monitoring and managing their environment through Veeam ONE. If you haven’t heard about it, you are truly missing out, as it works not only for your Veeam-powered data protection operations, but for entire VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments as well.

Read more

We continue our Windows Server 2016 series with step-by-step guide on Hyper-V deployment and management. Read more

Windows Server 2016 comes in Standard and Datacenter editions and offers several types of installation for both editions: Desktop Experience (full GUI mode), Core (no GUI) and Nano Server. We will go through the installation and configuration of Windows Server 2016 with a Core type deployment, the initial setup and preparing it for the Hyper-V role.

Read more

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