Posts by Chris Henley

Hyper-V is cool! Its technically sound and for all practical purposes has become an excellent choice for running infrastructure workloads in a virtual environment. Hyper-V is not just for test and development environments anymore. More and more businesses are relying on Hyper-V to run their production workloads like Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, and Active Directory. Production environments have strict operating requirements! Business relies on uptime and access!

So what if you were using Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 to run your Virtual Machines (VMs) and you have decided to make the move to Windows Server 2012 R2? How will you migrate those VMs? I get this question at least once a week so I decided to write the detailed answer.

For those ... Read more

Q: If I use replication for a virtual machine does that mean that I no longer need to worry about backing it up?

A: The short answer is you should still back up the virtual machine! The reason is that all data protection systems seek to eliminate the two critical challenges of downtime, and data loss. Each problem costs the business lots of money. In the IT industry the goals of limiting, or even eliminating, data loss and downtime are referred to as Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) (for data loss), and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) (for downtime.)

There has been a lot of talk about Hyper-V in its 2012 editions. One of the questions that I hear on a regular basis is about which version of Hyper-V to use. Usually the conversation goes something like this.

“So Microsoft makes Hyper-V Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V?”

“Yes.”

“Hyper-V Server 2012 is a free download, right?”

“Right!”

“So why would I want to use Windows Server 2012 to get Hyper-V?”

The question is a good one, and it has a really good answer. Licensing! Here are the nitty gritty details. First this from the Microsoft Hyper-V Server2012 page;

“Hyper-V Server is a dedicated stand-alone product that contains the hypervisor, Windows Server driver model, virtualization capabilities, and ... Read more

Last year the development team at Veeam turned the backup and recovery of Microsoft Exchange database objects on its ear. What used to be a time-consuming and unwieldy process usually performed by a separate, complex, for purchase product has become a powerful, easy-to-use, free feature included in Veeam Backup & Replication. 

Today Veeam is disrupting the market again with the announcement of Veeam Explorer™ for Microsoft SharePoint. SharePoint databases, like Exchange databases, contain large numbers of shared files and folders that are used for a variety of business operations.

Our customers love Veeam Backup & Replication! We get all kinds of positive comments about how easy it is to set up, configure, and operate. We hear about how powerful it is in backup and recovery operations. All of this goodness comes at a very affordable price point.

Powerful, Easy-to-Use, and Affordable. That’s Veeam!

Veeam builds innovative software that helps a business to realize the promises of virtualization. Veeam’s products support virtual machines (vm’s) running in multiple hypervisor environments including VMware and Hyper-V. The changes and improvements to Windows Server 2012, particularly as they relate to Hyper-V, and to storage, are incredibly exciting! Let me give you a great example!

I have the opportunity to work with some really smart people who do some really great things with technology. Steven Duckaert is a co worker and friend who is one of those IT guys who takes what is possible and makes it Reality! Recently I saw him do a demonstration of integrating Veeam Backup & Replication and System Center to automate VM recovery.  I asked him to write it up so I could put it on the Blog. The following post is what he wrote. It’s a great Post! Thanks Steven!

How much is Hyper-V? Hmmm….. free is not really the right answer because you don’t technically “Buy” Hyper-V. In fact you can’t buy Hyper-V!

Microsoft has structured the delivery of its Hyper-V hypervisor in such a way as to have no impact on the bottom line software acquisition costs to an organization. Cha-Ching! Here’s how it works.

Hyper-V comes in several packaged forms. (None of which let you buy Hyper-V)

While running a VM in Hyper-V, it is likely that you are also using all of the associated files (assuming, of course, that you are using snapshots). That said, it is important to understand that each virtual machine in Hyper-V has an association with its Hyper-V host: A GUID, which is how it is known and recognized on the Hyper-V host.