If you were considering becoming a cybercriminal or were perhaps a traditional villain looking to upgrade your skills for the 21^st century, I’m sure your business model of choice would be running a ransomware operation. You would, thanks to the simplicity of platforms like Ransomware as a Service and the willingness of victims to pay ransomware fees, be running a very successful business — albeit an illegal business — in a matter of days or weeks. Such is the ongoing success of ransomware as a means of extorting money from victims.

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Hello from Veeam Support!

Veeam Support Team is excited to announce a brand-new way of sharing useful and important information with you. We have prepared a series of advanced-level tech articles based on real support cases. We hope you will like these articles as much as we like to help our customers.

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In this blog post, we're going to talk about a new feature Microsoft has brought to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2016 called VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) Sets and how to configure them. Read more

Having a clear picture of what VM snapshots and backups can do for you is critical when your data is at stake. To dispel any doubts, snapshots are NOT backups. They are two different processes designed to address different needs. Today, I’m going to explain the discrepancy between VM snapshots and backups and provide you with a few scenarios where each of them best fits.

While it is true that many Veeam products will use a snapshot as part of a backup — a snapshot by itself is not a backup. This logic applies to VMware VM snapshots, Hyper-V checkpoints and storage snapshots as well.

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In this post, I am going to explain Switch Embedded Teaming (SET) and describe how to configure it using PowerShell on Windows Server 2016. Read more

Monitoring data center performance is an essential part of every IT administrator’s job that shouldn’t be overlooked. There are many avenues you can go down when looking at a tool to help monitor performance, but with Veeam, you can do this with Veeam ONE. Veeam ONE has many capabilities, but one of the most important features is the alarm it triggers when part of your virtual environment isn’t working as it should. Pre-built alarms included in Veeam ONE keep IT administrators up-to-date on the operations and issues occurring in their environment in real-time.

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A few years ago, the file exclusion engine was introduced to Veeam Backup & Replication. This was primarily meant to handle situations such as a large set file data that you didn’t need in an image-based backup. One example I had users liked was a SQL Server (especially before Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server) that had SQL Server DBAs performing SQL Server Agent jobs or SQL Server Maintenance Plans to export flat backups on disk and transaction log exports.

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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.

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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.

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