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

Modern enterprises know that disasters are a fact of life. They also understand that disasters come in many shapes and sizes and lead to varying degrees of Availability loss and impact on business continuity. Because major wide-scale disasters occur way less often than smaller disasters from within a data center, it’s also important to plan and test cloud disaster recovery models for smaller disasters that can happen at VM, guest OS or application levels. In this article we'll talk about the importance of planning and testing your DR strategy, as well as the categories of the cloud disaster recovery models. Read more

Windows Server 2016 comes with many brand-new features and options. One of the new deployment options is Nano Server, a new headless installation option for Windows Server 2016. Nano Server is a highly-minimized installation that is 20-25x smaller than traditional Windows, which only includes the required bits for the running OS. A unique component of Nano Server is the fact that it has no Graphical User Interface (GUI) and no built-in management tools, it’s the only recovery console where you can change network settings, firewall rules, and reset WinRM. Learn about Nano Server Deployment starting with the creation of a new nano server image in the part 1 of the Deployment series! Read more

icrosoft has a new Windows Server 2016 and Veeam has a new Veeam Availability Suite 9.5. The release dates of these two great products are too close to be a coincidence. In fact, I know that many of the features of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 were built specifically for Windows Server 2016. Many of our competitors in the Availability marketplace will claim that they have “support” for Windows Server 2016, which in most cases just means that they can back up an instance of Windows Server 2016 if the conditions are right. At Veeam, we don’t just support Windows Server 2016.

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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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Cloud computing is hardly a new player of the IT world. Its ever-growing market share and popularity within the IT community derives from combining flexible prices with the Always-On Availability of infrastructure resources. It brings out a whole new world of possibilities for your business, while reducing the long-term costs of maintaining your own infrastructure. Yet, despite the obvious cost advantages of moving data to the cloud, pricing is still a top concern, as Veeam discovered from our recent 2016 cloud end-user survey (see chart below).

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Have you ever gotten tired of doing the same routine operations over and over again? What about that one where you create a new Virtual Machine (VM), install the guest Operating System (OS), enable the necessary features, apply updates and then install the typical set of software? Well, there’s a remedy for this problem and you’ll only need to do everything once! The process includes preparing a base reference VM which can be used later as new applications and services are requested. This reference VM is called a VM template and it can help you in many ways. In this article, we'll take a look at how this can be done! Read more