Posts by Chris Henley

Greetings fellow IT professionals! After more than 20 years of TechEd in the late spring and early summer, Microsoft will give us Microsoft Ignite (formerly TechEd) in the fall from Sept. 25 – 29, 2017 in beautiful Orlando, Florida. I am so excited to get together with 10,000 of my closest IT friends at the Orange County Convention Center and talk about the amazing emerging technologies and innovations that will change the shape of our world for the foreseeable future.

Veeam produces the world’s best Availability solutions. Over the last two years, our customers have become increasingly interested in Availability solutions in the cloud, specifically in Microsoft Azure. Veeam has always been and continues to be hardware agnostic. We always let our customers choose their preferred hardware, or in this case cloud provider. With that said, Veeam has built six show-stopping innovations for our customers who are looking to use Veeam with Microsoft Azure to strengthen their Availability story in the hybrid cloud.

In “The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing,” Peter Mell and Timothy Grace point out that there are four types of clouds: Private, public, community, and a hybrid mix of at least two of these. If you are thinking “What is a community cloud?” then I encourage you to go back and read the NIST paper. It’s really short and succinct, and your personal cloud vocabulary will be better for it. The vast majority of business will end up using their own private clouds and interfacing with various public cloud offerings from their partners. Availability seems to fit just perfectly as a hybrid cloud opportunity.

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.

Here at Veeam we work hard at building great relationships with our customers and our partners. We have some amazing alliances with the industry’s leaders. Our Microsoft alliance relationship is of incredible value! Microsoft plays such a key role in technology, we seem to encounter them at every level of our business from software development to marketing, channel partners, sales and promotions, innovation, and of course, we share the same end customers who are committed to availability using Veeam, Windows Server, virtualization, and cloud.

To begin with, we all know that Hyper-V comes as a free addition to Windows Server 2012 R2. There are Standard and Data Center Editions. There is also a free version of Hyper-V called Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 that doesn’t require that you purchase a WS license? Finally, we need to get a clear understanding of the concept of virtualization rights.

In order to really understand the details of what Hyper-V is and why it’s so important you have to go back to its roots and to the roots of virtualization itself. In the late 1960’s IBM was working on operating systems at their Cambridge Scientific Center. These operating systems were for mainframe computers, the PC revolution had not begun.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote “3 Easy Steps to Migrate to Hyper-V 2012 R2” talking about how to migrate VM’s from Windows Server 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012 R2. Since then I keep hearing the same question over and over again.

Question: When you migrate VMs from Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 to Hyper V in Windows Server 2012 R2 can you also automate conversion from .vhd to .vhdx? And can it be done with minimum interruption to the operation of the workload of the VM?

Answer: YES!

Today Veeam announces Veeam Explorer for Active Directory! Veeam Explorer for Active Directory is a valuable and innovative extension for Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam Explorer for Active Directory will allow you to browse the backup of an NTDS.DIT database to locate containers, objects, and their attributes and then restore them to their original location in the running domain controller or to a new location.

In the good old days, like yesterday, Active Directory recovery demanded the downtime associated with restoring the VM that hosted the Active Directory Domain Controller and then using active directory restore mode to recover containers, objects, and their attributes. Unfortunately some attributes such as passwords were problematic or downright impossible to ... Read more

There is one word that brings fear and exasperation to the hearts of IT Professionals everywhere. Licensing! The installation of every operating system and application comes with the required and totally ignored EULA. We all find ways not to read the EULA. A contract embedded in an installation program seems counterintuitive. Imagine how long an installation would take if you actually read the EULA. The ways and means with which licenses are issued and established in the IT world are as varied as imagination will allow. Creativity in licensing is so prevalent that there are certified licensing specialists who make their entire careers out of making licensing recommendations. Why does it have to be so hard? ... Read more