Every Windows administrator knows task manager. It is one of these tools we use on a daily basis and is used for many different troubleshooting purposes. The task manager tool is embedded in every Microsoft Windows Operating system. The first taskman.exe, which actually showed a list of running applications, was introduced with Windows 3.x. Windows task manager with its view of processes, applications and resource usage was introduced in Windows NT 4.0.

Today, we are very happy and proud to announce another great free tool coming from Veeam: Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V.

If you are a Windows administrator, then you need to check this one out. We all know that opening task manager on a windows server running Hyper-V only gives you the compute of the parent partition and not what resources the virtual machines are consuming.

To back up, or not to back up? That is the question. What do you back up on your Hyper-V hosts, if anything? This came to me from a discussion on Spiceworks recently. The original topic was a different matter, but the challenge I raised was that the Hyper-V host itself doesn’t need to be backed up, if you do Hyper-V well. As an important side note, definitely back up the VMs! You can use Veeam for that, it just works!

In the previous post, How-to: Free Exchange discovery tool helps admin, I described how to make a quick, easy and free e-discovery in a Microsoft Exchange database. In a similar way, you can recover any deleted email or item from the .EDB.

Let’s take a closer look. There is a market for paid Exchange recovery tools where it is possible to restore single mailbox items from the raw Exchange database (.EDB); however their price is very high. You can get similar granular recovery with Veeam for free.

If you’ve got a problem with your Exchange Server, Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange can help recover mailboxes, messages, contacts, folders, tasks and ... Read more

I hope this never happens to you, but if you ever receive a legal discovery request, you may find this post useful. One of my IT friends shared this story of when he had to do an exchange discovery for a set of keyword combinations on historical email communications that he thought might have happened 2 years ago. This kind of discovery would be a real challenge for a lot of IT organizations.

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.

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

Last year, we wrote about a free tool for backing up virtual machines (VMs) in VMware and Hyper-V environments – Veeam Backup Free Edition. Veeam recently released v7, an updated version that delivers important new features and capabilities. In this article, I’ll point out some powerful features you’ll find in the new version of Veeam Backup Free Edition.

When I wrote the Infographic, Veeam Backup & Replication v7: By the Numbers; I made a distinct effort to ensure that Backup Free Edition was well represented. In fact, I counted 12 powerful features by Backup Free Edition:

Sometimes the easy things in life come along and make your day so much better. Recently I found a very easy way to edit .VMX files with Veeam Backup Free Edition. This technique was used before with FastSCP (now replaced by Veeam Backup Free Edition) with the FastSCP Editor. This editor is still available in Veeam Backup Free Edition (as well as the paid versions, of course) and makes editing .VMX files very easy!

While there are a number of reasons why you may want to edit the .VMX file, and because of such there are a few guidelines. First, don’t do this on a powered-on virtual machine, because it may cause unexpected behavior. Granular options like ... Read more