I always liked the series “7 blog posts MSPmentor didn’t write” from MSPMentor website. It was one of the first examples of blog digest I found several years ago. I was almost going to start my own digest one or two years ago, when I found some other bloggers doing the same. I thought at first mine would have been a useless redundancy, so I gave up; as months passed by however I looked at those digests, and I often found the suggested posts were different from the ones I would have marked as important or cool in that period. Obviously, anyone has a different perception of what it’s important and what he likes, so I decided to collect and share nice articles I usually read around.
These series is not going to be scheduled; instead, as the title suggests, I will publish a new post everytime my favorite list will reach 5 posts. Also, I’m trying to have a common topic among the blog posts I’m linking, and the first topic is Veeam Backup & Replication.
What is the buzz around Backup from Storage Snapshots anyway?
My colleague and SE Tim Dewin has written a really great post about how vSphere snapshots work, and the pros and cons when using this technology for data protection activities. Really a must read for everyone to better understand this fundamental technology. Go Timo!
Exchange (DAG) VMware Backups: Updated list of tips and tricks for Veeam Backup & Replication
Another post from another colleague, this time is Andreas Neufert from Germany. This post is among our team a kind of bible about how to backup virtualized Exchange DAG. Andreas has constantly updated the post with fixes, further details and new findings. If you want to backup a multi-server Exchange environment, be sure to read this post.
Animated Retention Policies/Modes
Have you ever struggled to explain how the different retention policies and backup modes work? Here is a nice solution that can help you score big points at customers and colleagues. I always liked especially the animation explaining Reversed Incremental mode, and how a Synthetic Full backup is created. They are all animated gif files, so you can easily save them and incorporate in other documents or web pages.
Best practices with Veeam and Tintri
The guys at Tintri created a wonderful whitepaper, in regards of using Veeam Backup & Replication together with Tintri storage. Even if you are not using a Tintri array, this is a good way to learn some of the concepts and best procedures to use Veeam in conjunction with an Hybrid/NFS array. I really liked the table with the list of recommended practices, useful as a quick reference for configuration operations. Veeam was not involved in its creation, so all the kudos for the nice paper goes to the Tintri guys, really well done!
Windows 8.1 and Veeam Backup & Replication
Another post from Andreas Neufert, this time with a couple of quick tips to use Windows 8.1 as a machine to install Veeam Backup & Replication onto it.