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

A few years ago, the file exclusion engine was introduced to Veeam Backup & Replication. This was primarily meant to handle situations such as a large set file data that you didn’t need in an image-based backup. One example I had users liked was a SQL Server (especially before Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server) that had SQL Server DBAs performing SQL Server Agent jobs or SQL Server Maintenance Plans to export flat backups on disk and transaction log exports.

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In the previous article, Mike went over the most exciting new features of Hyper-V 2016 TP4 at the time. However, since its Technical Preview stages it went through some changes and not every feature made it to the GA in its initial form or intended way. Windows Server 2016 has been fully available since the end of 2016 and there were some features left out in the article that are still interesting and quite important. Read more

We continue our Windows Server 2016 series with step-by-step guide on Hyper-V deployment and management. Read more

Along with the new functionality of Windows Server 2016, another essential element of any domain administrator — Active Directory — has been updated with some very important and great features. One of the updates that aims to improve the environment’s protection against external and internal threats to accounts is called privileged access management (PAM). This functionality is based on the idea of Just Enough Administration (JEA), which is a security technology that allows the delegation of administration rights with the help of PowerShell. Read more

It shouldn't be a surprise that Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a very popular CRM application across many customers, both large and small. A critical workload application such as CRM must have a good backup strategy.

The good news is that you can protect your CRM infrastructure using Veeam backup, and setting up Veeam replication is an easy process. It is also very easy to deploy. When it comes time to recover, Veeam can offer several options, depending on the SLA in place.

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In previous parts of this Nano Server deployment series, we learned how to create, deploy and configure Nano Server as a Hyper-V host. In this part, we will look for a clustering option. We will create a Hyper-V cluster of 3 Nano Server host nodes with Storage Spaces Direct on it. Read more