Believe it or not, I used to work a lot with Microsoft SQL Server. While I did not call myself a database administrator (DBA), I did know my way around a database or two. Since I’ve been at Veeam, I have always enjoyed telling the Veeam story around using SQL Server as a critical application that needs the best Availability options.

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In recent years we have all been hearing about cloud transformation. Many organizations already adopt such a strategy, but we still don’t see the large organizations move to all or full cloud strategies.

For some businesses, cloud is a cost saver when they move or run the workload from the cloud. For many other organizations, especially the large ones, an all-cloud strategy is not the best fit. Many things force them to keep and run most of their workload from an on-premises data center. If we look at today’s data centers, we realize that the data center is mostly running on top of a virtualization layer which introduces the basics of the hybrid cloud.

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Networking has always been one of the most complex parts of any IT solution, and whether you are connecting into a remote site, connecting branch offices together or extending on-premises networks to the cloud, there is traditionally a high level of complexity and cost that's involved in establishing a reliable networking solution. When it comes to networking during a disaster, the level of complexity and margin for error is magnified. In relative terms, it has become easy to back up, replicate and then recover workloads, but getting access to those recovered systems remains a cumbersome process.

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I have been asked a lot about how to configure time in your domain when all the Domain Controllers (DCs) are virtual and running on Microsoft Hyper-V. People will say just stick to a physical DC. However, sometimes this is not an option. In this article, I am going to walk you through the best way to set up time synchronization. Read more

PowerShell has come a long way from a command line interpreter with support of a few commands, to a fully integrated part of every modern Windows OS. Right now, not only is it a cool thing to, but it is also essential in order to achieve better results in Windows tasks’ management, including virtual machine (VM) backup.

This is a two-part article. In the first part, I’m going to talk about PowerShell in general, when you should consider using it for Hyper-V backup and how to get acquainted with PowerShell basics, PowerShell commands (cmdlets) and syntax.

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When Windows Server 2016 was released, Microsoft brought us a new feature I personally have been waiting for since I first started with Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2. That feature is Virtual Machine Start Ordering. Virtual Machine Start Ordering enables us to make dependencies between VMs or Groups of VMs to make sure that they start in the correct order. Read more

In the past, we had to deal with remote server administration through cumbersome Microsoft Management Console (MMC) based tools, Server Manager, PowerShell remoting, along with various other methods. This has been a real pain point for Windows and especially Hyper-V Administrators. Over the years, VMware has been long ahead of the game with HTML management capabilities of their hypervisor. Until now… I would like to introduce Microsoft’s brand-new Project Honolulu and HTML tool to replace Server Manager. Read more

It's been nearly a year since VMware released vSphere 6.5 which marked the 12^th major release of VMware's hypervisor and hypervisor management product suite. And while VMware has been focusing on more recent products like vSAN and NSX, it shouldn't be forgotten that vSphere still remains at the core of the virtualization platform on top of which all other products are consumed. Veeam has a strong history of working with and supporting vSphere features, and the 6.5 release is no different.

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Let’s have a look at some basics of Hyper-V Storage management about the management of Hyper-V .BIN files and their impact on your environment. Read more

Hey, Veeam fans! Welcome to my blog post series on Hyper-V Management. Today we will look at Hyper-V administration best practices. Now, whenever I am talking with customers and attendees at conferences, best practices are always some of the most popular topics. So, in this blog post, I will give you three of my favorite best practices for Hyper-V administration. Read more