Back in April I did two webinars for Veeam about What’s new in Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V (English) and Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V for Small Businesses (German). Veeam made the recording of those sessions available for free. Checkout both webinar recordings for free:
A couple of week ago I was presenting for Veeam about Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and Veeam Backup & Replication v7 R2. The webinar was in German and during a huge request from people about an English webinar, Veeam offered to do the same webinar in English. Together with Aseem Anwar I will present about the new feature in Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V showing the following enhancements:
The webinar will take place on Thursday 24 April 11:00 CEST (10:00 BST) and you can register free on the Veeam website. The webinar will be held in English.
There will be also a second webinar about Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and Veeam Backup and Replication in German together with Moritz Höfer. This webinar will focus on small businesses and will show you how you can make use of Hyper-V and Veeam Backup & Replication in a small business environment.
The webinar will take place on Thursday 23 April 15:00 CEST and you can register free on the Veeam website. The webinar will be held in German.
If you have any are interested in Hyper-V 2012 R2 or Veeam Backup & Replication or how the products work together, you should definitely join this free webinar.
Yesterday I had the chance to do a webinar on Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and Veeam Backup & Replication V7 R2 together with Moritz Höfer (System Engineer at Veeam). The webinar is in German and covers some of the new feature ins Hyper-V 2012 R2 and the Veeam Backup & Replication solution for Hyper-V with slides and live demos. You can watch the webinar for free on the Veeam website.
I have the honor to present together with Veeam System Engineer Moritz Höfer in a Webinar about Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and Veeam Backup & Replication v7 R2. In the Webinar we will cover the new feature in Hyper-V 2012 R2 and Veeam Backup & Replication v7 R2 which support both Hyper-V 2012 R2 as well as VMware vSphere 5.5. The webinar will take place on Wednesday 19 February 10:00 CET (UTC+1:00) and you can register free on the Veeam website. The webinar will be held in German.
UPDATE: You can get the recording of the Webinar here.
If you have any are interested in Hyper-V 2012 R2 or Veeam Backup & Replication or how the products work together, you should definitely join this free webinar.
Veeam just released their new flagship product Veeam Backup & Replication v7. The first release of the Veeam Backup & Replication was 5 years ago and Veeam did a lot of updates and improvements to their suite.
Innovation
v7 brings two innovations: Built-In WAN Acceleration and Backup from Storage Snapshots. While the “labels” of these features may not seem innovative, the technology behind them is. Our Built-In WAN Acceleration was developed from the ground up to work specifically with our backup file and data format. Our WAN acceleration is designed to help you save time and money when you need to get your backups offsite. Additionally, we’ll be bringing our WAN acceleration to replication jobs in a future release.
Backup from Storage Snapshots may seem like an “easy” task but once you take a look at what’s required in vSphere, you know it’s not. A standard approach to using storage snapshots on vSphere is to promote the snapshot to a LUN and temporarily attach it to a dedicated host…this operation alone can take up to 5 minutes and your backup hasn’t even started yet. Our engineers were able to get around this time-consuming task and further accelerate the backup by being able to leverage some key technology in vSphere and we know you’ll be impressed once you see it in action.
Features
v7 is packed full of features. We’ve already announced seven of the most disruptive features but the What’s New document contains many more. It seems that everyone has their “favorite” new feature in v7 although tape support seems to be close to the top for everyone. Personally, I’m excited about our vCloud Director support. We’ve been working on vCD support for a while but it was “not quite good enough” to make it into a previous release. I’m confident that our vCD support is second to none and when you see how easy it is to use, I’m sure you’ll agree. A big feature for our Hyper-V customers is the inclusion of Virtual Labs for Hyper-V. Now Hyper-V customers have access to SureBackup Recovery Verification, U-AIR and the On-Demand Sandbox capability that our VMware users have enjoyed for 3 years. There are a lot of other features and I’d love to hear what your favorite new feature is in the comments section.
Get more information about the Veeam Backup & Replication v7 on the Veeam Blog or on the product page.
Some weeks ago an awesome packet arrived at our office in Bern and I finally have time to write about the content.
Several months ago Microsoft acquired a company called StorSimple but there was no real buzz around this. But for me this is a huge step and shows in which direction the whole Cloud and Datacenter future will go.
StorSimple is one of the vendors which produced Cloud integrated Storage (CiS). Basically StorSimple is a hardware storage appliance with multiple storage tiers such as SSD or SAS disks and now also the Cloud which means Windows Azure.
As mentioned the box contains SSD and SAS disk which can be attached via iSCSI to your environment. ISCSI is not really the prefer option for me but I expect Microsoft to implement SMB 3.0 in the StorSimple box.
Primary Storage with SSD speed – The StorSimple box can be used as a primary storage with SSD speed. The box is certified for Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012 and VMware but at the moment the StorSimple is maybe not made for running virtual machines on it. I would say it’s a great solution to attach the storage to you SMB file server and use it to expand your storage to the cloud.
Automatic Archiving – Cold data can be moved to cheap storage in Windows Azure which can grow with your needs, while hot data is running on-premise on your SSD or SAS storage.
Backup & Restore – Files can be backed up and restored from the Cloud. Incremental, deduplicated snapshots reduce storage requirements by over 90%
while delivering instant snapshot and restore technology in minutes as opposed
to days. Cloud Snapshots offer offsite data protection via the cloud. It is now
simple and cost-effective to retain as many snapshots as you need – no more 30,
60 or 90 day limits.
Multi Location Disaster Recovery – If a disaster strikes and you lose your datacenter you can restore you StorSimple box to a new StorSimple box, on the same location or on another, directly from the Windows Azure Cloud.
Military-grade Security – All data stored in the cloud with StorSimple has military-grade encryption applied to it. The encryption key is never given to StorSimple or the cloud provider, ensuring complete data privacy to support compliance requirements as stringent as HIPAA.
Enterprise-class Storage
StorSimple solutions offer enterprise-class high-availability with fully redundant disk controllers, power supplies, network connections and no single point of failure. They also support non-disruptive software upgrades.
Application-optimized Storage and Data Protection – Application-optimized volumes for Windows file shares, SharePoint and VMware libraries. Full support for VSS application-consistent snapshots is provided.
If you want to know more about StorSimple check out the StorSimple website.
A few weeks ago I worked with Symantec on a whitepaper called Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions. After we finished we also had a Youtube Live Stream where we talked about the content of this whitepaper.
You can now watch this video on Youtube:
Together with Symantec, Mahmoud Magdy (Microsoft MVP for Exchange Server) and Mikko Nykyri (VMware vExpert) we produced a whitepaper called “Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions”. This whitepaper covers an overview about virtualization and the challenges which come with the new workloads in terms of backup and recovery.
Because of the outstanding economy, flexibility, and service levels it offers, virtualization is transforming data centers at breakneck speed: by 2016, an estimated 80 percent of the world’s x86 servers will be virtual machines (VMs).1 But the speed of this transformation, along with the high resource utilization, ease of cloning, moving workloads, and other ways virtualization works its magic, raise challenges for “traditional” IT services and the teams that deliver them. Nowhere is the complexity that virtualization creates for traditional IT services more apparent than in backup and recovery, which participants in a recent Symantec survey ranked among their least-successful IT initiatives. This paper addresses five critical decisions organizations must make when building a backup and recovery plan to:
- Maintain protection, visibility, and control of applications and data.
- Maximize utilization of established infrastructure, processes, staff, and budget.
- Use virtualization to improve backup and recovery processes.
- Create an efficient, scalable, future-prepared backup and recovery environment.
Each issue is presented first in general terms that apply across IT environments, and then add comments for specific platforms, applications, or industries based on our individual experience as VMware® vExperts and Microsoft® MVPs.
You can download the whitepaper here: Symantec Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions
Make also sure you checkout the Google Hangout event on Fri, May 10, 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM.
Join a panel of virtualization experts including Microsoft MVPs Mahmoud Magdy & Thomas Mauer and VMware vExpert Mikko Nykyri as they discuss the white paper they co-authored and offer their thoughts on the most important things to consider for a virtualized server environment.
Microsoft just announced the preview of Windows Azure Recovery Services which at the moment include Windows Azure Backup and Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager.
To use Windows Azure Backup you first have to enable the preview in your Azure Portal. After that you can create a new Backup Vault where you can store your data.
After that you have to add a certificate to the Backup Vault. You can do this using this guy here: Upload certificates to the vault
The easiest way to do this for testing with the preview version is to create a self-signed certificate on the host you will register for the Windows Azure Online Backup.
After that you can upload the certificate to Windows Azure by using the Windows Azure Portal.
After you have successfully uploaded the certificate you can now download the Windows Azure Online Backup agent. Make sure you pick the right one, you can download one for Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1 – Data Protection Manager or an agent for Windows Server 2012 Essentials. The Agent for Windows Server 2012 is around 18MB.
After you finally registered your server you can now schedule a backup. At the moment you can do the following configuration settings in the preview.
In the Windows Azure Portal you can see the Azure Backup Dashboard with more information about your servers and files.
Microsoft just released Windows Azure Recovery Services (Preview) for the features like Backup and Hyper-V Recovery Manager.
Windows Azure Backup (Preview) – This is your offsite backup to cloud solutions, which integrates in Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 Essentials, or System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager. These tools provide similar experiences configuring, monitoring, and recovering backups whether to local disk or Windows Azure storage. After data is backed up to the cloud, authorized users can easily recover backups to any server.
Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager (Preview) – This allows you to easily failover private clouds to a secondary datacenter- This feature integrates in System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager and uses the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Replica technology to replicate your private cloud. It helps you to orchestrate datacenter failovers or recovery of virtual machines. The solution offers also the same features as Hyper-V replica but in a much bigger scale.
You can get more information here: Windows Azure Recovery Services
My name is Thomas Maurer. I am a Senior Program Manager & Chief Evangelist for Azure Hybrid at Microsoft. I am part of the Azure engineering team (Cloud + AI) and engage with the community and customers around the world. Opinions are my own.
