Posts by Andrew Zhelezko

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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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

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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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

This blogpost is a continuation of my series for those who have already started their Hyper-V journey and discovered the great benefits that Hyper-V technology brings to companies and system admin. I will now describe the first steps of Hyper-V deployment, the initial configuration and how to launch your first virtual machine (VM) there. Read more

As I’ve recently noticed some confusion around the difference between the terms Hyper-V VM versions and Hyper-V VM generations, I like to clarify a few things and then talk a bit more about each. Read more

This post is part four of a series where I discuss granular recovery of Active Directory objects and different scenarios and tools for such operations.

In the previous article, I described the cases where administrators worked with Domain Controllers running Active Directory off a functional level of Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. I detailed the steps they had to do in order to reanimate the tombstone objects using LDP and Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory utilities.

Today, I’m moving on to newer systems with the Active Directory recycle bin feature enabled.

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This is the 3^rd article from my Active Directory protection series. In the previous one, I covered the domain controller recovery process. However, I believe that is a less common operation when compared to other Active Directory requests system administrators constantly receive. Among those requests, I believe the most frequent is Active Directory objects change.

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This is the second article from my series on Active Directory (AD) protection with Veeam. In the previous post, I reviewed physical and virtual Domain Controller (DC) backup procedures. Today, I will discuss recovery procedures. Read more

Microsoft Active Directory is a standard in corporate environments where authentication and central user-management are required. It’s almost impossible to imagine how system administrators would be able to do their jobs effectively if this technology didn’t exist. Not only is Active Directory a great power, but it's also a great responsibility — and it requires spending a lot of time with it in order to maximize its capabilities. Read more