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You know you’re a SysAdmin when…
Did you know that 29% of data loss cases are caused by accident? As World Backup Day nears, we think back to all the incidents, data loss scares, and near-disasters that we’ve experienced over the years – and how grateful we were to have backup during those times!
If you use Microsoft 365/Office 365, Hyper-V or VMware, celebrate with Altaro. All you have to do is sign up for a 30-day free trial of either Altaro VM Backup or Altaro Office 365 Backup – it’s your choice!
What can you win?
• Receive a guaranteed $20 Amazon voucher when you sign up for and use the trial of Altaro Office 365 Backup or Altaro VM Backup
– Get a chance to WIN one of our Grand Prizes when you complete the sentence “You know you’re a SysAdmin when…” What are you waiting for? Sign up now!
Office 365 backup
Microsoft Partner Altaro launched a new solution incorporating secure storage and centralized backup management:
Altaro Office 365 Backup
Altaro Office 365 Backup enables customers to back up and restore all their company’s Office 365 mailboxes on an annual subscription. It automatically backs up Office 365 mailboxes to a secure cloud backup location on Altaro’s Microsoft Azure infrastructure and enables users to centrally manage and monitor their backups through a cloud-based management console.
Altaro successfully entered the Office 365 backup market a few months ago with its solution that enables managed service providers (MSPs) to provide their customers with Office 365 backup, recovery and mailbox backup storage services. The channel-focused company is now also extending this offering for use by businesses and organizations who do not wish to subscribe to an MSP model, and to the IT consultants and resellers that service them.
A central component of data protection strategies
As part of their data protection strategy, it is crucial that businesses back up their Office 365 mailboxes: Microsoft does not back up Office 365 subscriber data, so companies risk losing critical data due to malicious or accidental incidents, such as mailbox deletion and malware attacks.
Altaro’s latest solution meets this need by providing customers with reliable and constant backup and recovery services for Office 365 mailboxes – emails, attachments, contacts and calendars – coupled with automatic storage to Altaro’s Azure infrastructure.
Convenient, fuss-free Office 365 backup and recovery
For one all-inclusive annual or multi-year fee, Altaro Office 365 Backup customers receive backup and recovery services, backup storage services, access to the cloud console for centralized backups management, and outstanding 24/7 support from a team of experts.
This means customers can avoid the headache and expense of setting up local storage infrastructure or software to save backups to. Additionally, thanks to the product automatically backing up the mailboxes several times per day, customers can literally set it and forget it.
Combatting Office 365 data loss risks
“Many Office 365 subscribers wrongly assume that their data is backed up as part of the Microsoft package – but this is not the case, as Office 365 was not intended to be a data protection tool. This means several organizations out there are currently vulnerable to data loss risks,” said David Vella, Altaro CEO.
“This is where Altaro Office 365 Backup comes in, providing robust backup, recovery, and backup storage and management services that customers can rely on,” he explained. “We’ve built on our backup expertise and proven track record in the industry to help set Office 365 subscribers’ minds at rest.”
Free trial
Resellers, consultants and organizations wishing to try the solution can do so for free and with no commitment for 30 days, by registering here.
Azure ASR’s SLA-backed enhanced VMware to Azure solution is now ready to replicate your on-premises workloads to Azure
You heard right. Microsoft has launched an enhanced version of its Azure Site Recovery (ASR) targeted especially for VMware customers.
The concept of ASR is very simple: organisations will be able to replicate their VMware virtual machines (VMs) to Azure, update and then run them in Azure as a disaster recovery option. They will be charged a small amount by VM but won’t have to pay for compute or storage until the VM is up and running in Azure.
To note, Azure Site Recovery, as part of Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), enables your organisation to gain control and manage your workloads no matter the source: Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMware or OpenStack.
Some of the key ASR characteristics:
- With non-disruptive recovery testing, you can easily test the failover of your VMware virtual machines to Azure within minutes, and validate your workload’s performance in Azure, without impacting on-going replication or the production workload.
- With ASR-integrated failback, start replicating your Azure virtual machines back to your on-premises ESXi environment, and failback to the original or an alternate location when your on-premises site is once again available for use.
- Heterogeneous workload support, automated VMware vCenter Server discovery
- Continuous data protection (CDP), one-click failovers with ASR Recovery Plan
- Rich health monitoring and e-mail notifications.
I’ve been working with ASR for a while and I definitely recommend it.
Source:https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/site-recovery-vmware-to-azure-classic/
Ready to start using ASR? Check out additional product information, to start replicating your workloads to Microsoft Azure using Azure Site Recovery today. You can use the powerful replication capabilities of Site Recovery for 31 days at no charge for every new physical server or virtual machine that you replicate.
You can read the announcement at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ga-enhanced-migration-and-disaster-recovery-for-vmware-virtual-machines-and-physical-servers-to-azure-using-asr/
VSS Backups failing after KB3000853
I have been contacted by some people asking about backup issues they are experiencing on Windows Server 2012 . The issue is related with the Microsoft November update release KB3000853.
My recommendation is to remove the update until Microsoft fix the issue as it affected Microsoft and third party backup products.
As per Taylor Brown’s (Hyper-V Program Manager) blog,
“We are getting reports that some customers are seeing backup jobs fail after installing the latest Windows Updates including the November rollup (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/3000853).
We believe there is an issue with the KB3000853 update and are working to fix it as quickly as possible, in the interim downloading and applying http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2996928/ should address the problem”
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/taylorb/archive/2014/11/19/backup-jobs-failing-post-nov-rollup-install.aspx
What’s New in Hyper-V vNext ? Check out at the Infrastructure Saturday event in Brisbane
Saturday 22nd November
Infrastructure Saturday is a day long event for south east Queensland based IT Professional that work with Microsoft products. This event is an educational, informative & lively day filled with sessions about Microsoft technologies.
Location: Microsoft office, Brisbane, QLD. http://www.infrastructuresaturday.com/
Topics covered in my Session: What’s New in Hyper-V vNext?
- New Virtual Machine Upgrade Process
- New Integration Components installation method
- Secure Boot for Linux
- Distributed Storage Quality of Service (QoS)
- Hyper-V Backup
- Hyper-V Virtual Machine Configuration
- Cluster OS Rolling Upgrade
Resource outage when moving physical disc when using DPM to backup an HyperV Cluster.
Microsoft just released a critical fix for hyper cluster that have been backed up by System Center DPM
“Physical Disk resource move during the backup of a Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) may cause resource outage”.
If you have configured a Windows Server 2012-based Hyper-V failover cluster CSV and your backup software perform the backup by using snapshots and the Physical Disk resource is moved to another node in the cluster, the Physical Disk resource may fail to come online if the backup of the CSV is in progress. As a result, virtual machines that rely on the CSV may crash.
A supported hotfix is available from Microsoft. However, this hotfix is intended to correct only the problem that is described in this article. Apply this hotfix only to systems that are experiencing this specific problem.
More info :http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2869923
- Windows Server 2012 Datacenter
- Windows Server 2012 Essentials
- Windows Server 2012 Foundation
- Windows Server 2012 Standard
Hyper-V CSV protection with DPM 2010
DPM design for Hyper-V :
- Incremental Backups Only – full only once
- No More Backup Window – online backups
- Application consistency via VSS
- Protect Live Migration VMs in CSV clusters
- Protect whole VM, recover individual items
- Auto Protection of new VMs
- Routine backups – nightly or more frequently
Strategy to Deply DPM 2010 in Hyper-V/CSV environment :
1. Plan:
- Identify Project Requirements and scope
- Simulate using Hyper-V Calculator
- Review Hyper-V design guidelines & Best Practices
- Acquire VSS Hardware Provider & check environment with SDPM SAN Testing Tool:
- Verify that the SAN supports hardware snapshots & is certified for DPM.
- http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2010/02/05/tested-hardware-vss-provider-table.aspx
- Install the VSS hardware provider
- Self Certifying your SAN. If your SAN is not in the certified list & you have a SAN, run the SCDPM SAN Testing Tool : StartCSVTests.cmd /run ( to be realeased yet )
- Validate a Pilot Environment
- Ready for Deployment
- Integration components should be updated on both VMs.
- Ensure that Live Migration is functional
2. Deploy : Protected CSV server
- Install all recommended prerequisites:
| General Prerequisite | Install the integration components on the guests. For more information, see Install a Guest Operating System (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=165041). |
| Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2 | Install Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2 OR Install the Microsoft Hyper-V prerequisites (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=133781). |
| Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 | Install the following on the host computer:KB975354 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975354)KB975921 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975921) |
- Failover Cluster Validation
- Enable Automount : Enable Auto mount on the host for successful child partition backups : MOUNTVOL /E
- Install Hardware Provider:Ensure that VSS hardware providers are installed : vssadmin list providers
- Validate Hardware snapshots
- Use DSConfig Tool to serialize backups (for software snapshots providers only) :
· Problem:With software snapshots, simultaneous triggering of VM backups (especially scale deployments) will cause backup jobs to time out and fail.
· Enable Per CSV LUN Serialization:This serialization limits the number of virtual machine backups happening on a single CSV LUN.Create a DataSourceGroups.xml file by running the DSConfig.ps1 script on any one node of a cluster containing CSV.Place the file in the DPM server at %PROGRAMFILES%\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Config.Repeat step 1 for every cluster that is protected by a DPM server.The DataSourceGroups.xml file needs to be updated only when virtual machines are added, deleted, or modified in the cluster and protection is configured for them.
3. Deploy : DPM 2010 server
- Enable Hyper-V Role on DPM Server :DPM supports item-level recovery (ILR), which allows you to do granular recovery of files, folders, volumes, and virtual hard disks (VHDs) from a host-level backup of Hyper-V virtual machines to a network share or a volume on a DPM protected server. You must have the Hyper-V role enabled on the DPM server to perform item-level recoveries. During item-level recovery, DPM has to mount the VHDs of the protected virtual machines
- Install DPM server pre-requisites
- Install DPM 2010
- Turn off “TCP Chimney offload”For better throughput, TCP Chimney Offload should be turned off.
- Allocate Storage Pool & Deploy Agents
- Datasourcegroups.xml file:
- Merge the DatasourceGroups.XML file for all CSVs protected by DPM server. This is applicable when software providers are used on the CSV cluster.
- Copy the <Group> tags from all the DataSourceGroup.xml files generated and add the text between the <DataSourceGroup> tags. The DataSourceGroups.xml file will now contain one <header> tag, one <DataSourceGroup> tag, and <Group> tags from all CSV clusters.
- Configure Protection Groups
- DPM2010 provides Datasource caching for faster enquiry.
- Remember to clear cache if new VMs have been added
- Enable AutoProtection:
Script to Auto-add VMs : http://blogs.technet.com/dpm/archive/2009/12/03/hyper-v-protection-with-dpm-2010-beta-how-to-automatically-protect-new-virtual-machines.aspx
Recommended Books
System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 Cookbook
Cloudtidings.com 