Posts by Maria Levkina

Some of the best things in an admin’s life are indeed free, especially when it comes to backup and virtualization. Beyond star data-protection solutions and other must-have programs, there are quite a few free, yet no-less-powerful, backup tools out there.

In this article, I will consider Veeam Backup Free Edition, a handy-dandy backup tool for your Hyper-V VMs that will rock your world.

Over the last few years, virtualization has gained a lot of trust and many decided to virtualize Microsoft Exchange and other I\O intensive business apps. As a result, there have been many questions about the backup and recovery of those apps, including questions about what Veeam has to offer for such circumstances.

A VMware VM is a set of files containing all of the necessary information about a virtualized operating system. These files include the primary configuration file (.VMX), which keeps VM settings, the centralized file for storing information about VM snapshots (.VMSD) and other. The data of the VM is contained in the .VMDK file, the VMware virtual disk format. By way of analogy with physical servers, each VMware VM can have one or more virtual disks, which mean that your VM can contain several .VMDK files or otherwise said, can contain several “hard drives”.

Before installing any software, you need to become familiar with its system requirements so you’re sure that your computer has enough resources for optimal application function. For Veeam Backup & Replication, you need to decide if it should be installed on a physical or virtual machine.

Does Veeam recommend installing on a physical or virtual machine to its customers?

It depends on the virtual environment.

VMware vMotion is a vSphere feature that allows you to move a running VMware VM from one host to another, with no significant impact on your production environment. VMware vMotion was introduced in 2003 and is now a part of almost all VMware vSphere editions, except for vSphere Essentials Kit, which is designed for small virtual environments.

There are a number of scenarios when VMware vMotion might be helpful, starting with pre-defined hardware maintenance when you need to move your VMs to another ESX(i) host for a short period of time without downtime, and to proactive migration of live VMs away from underperforming servers. If your vSphere licensing includes VMware vMotion, congratulations, you are one lucky virtualization admin! But what should you ... Read more