One new announced feature in Windows Server 2019 is Storage Migration Service (SMS). SMS enables to ease drastically the migration from a file server to another. Moreover, SMS is fully manageable from Windows Admin Center as Microsoft has released an extension for this feature.

Windows Server 2019 should be available in barely two months. So, first migration will start shortly after. From experience, I know that the first feature customers ask for migrating is Active Directory. Therefore, I wanted to try In-Place Upgrade, which has been improved in Windows Server 2019. To try this feature, I upgraded a forest that is handled by two domain controllers running on Windows Server 2016. It was not a “click and fun” process, but Microsoft has really improved In-Place Upgrade. Let’s take a look at how to migrate Windows Server 2016 DC to 2019.

Veeam Backup and Replication is a backup and replication product. The backup part ensures your workloads are protected against bad manipulation, ransomware or disaster. It enables to restore the data in case of loss. The replication part ensures that your workloads can quickly start again in another datacenter in case of sinister in the first one. Products such as Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere can also handle this task. In this topic, I will show you how to leverage Veeam Backup and Replication to make a disaster recovery plan. The same steps can be applied to Hyper-V or VMware but in this topic, I will take VMware as example.

For the first time, Microsoft made an online Windows Server Summit at June 26th 2019. Microsoft talked about hybrid cloud, security, cloud native application and hyperconverged solution. Some of the new features which are coming with Windows Server 2019 were unleashed. In this topic, I’d like to summary what are the new features and why you should consider Storage Spaces Direct for a new installation or to update your existing cluster.

We all know what backup window really is, right? It’s an extremely short period of time that you are supposed to fit all your backup processes in somehow. Still, this challenge looks not that hard to accomplish as long as you are using that time wisely. That’s, actually, what Veeam Backup & Replication backup job chaining is intended for!

In part of my job, I audit some Hyper-V clusters to remediate issues such as Live Migration. Most of the time, Live Migration part is not well configured. For example, the wrong network is selected or authentication is left to CredSSP. In this topic, I’ll show you how I configure Live Migration in Hyper-V clusters (S2D or not).

Veeam has released in December the update 3 of Veeam Backup & Replication which brings the central management of Veeam Agent for Windows / Linux. Thanks to this update you can now manage backup of physical machines or cloud instances from a single pane. In this topic, we’ll see how to manage a physical machine from the console of Veeam Backup & Replication.

Since some time, VMware provides PowerCLI which is a set of modules for VMware vSphere. Except if you were in a cave last 10 years, you should know that PowerShell is a powerful scripting language. Initially, PowerShell enabled to manage only Windows Workstation or Server, but since sometimes, a lot of vendors make their own modules to manage their solutions (such as Veeam, VMware and so on). Moreover, PowerShell is available on Linux. For my job, I always use PowerShell. I’m a lazy guy, and if I have to make something two times, I make a script. This is the same thing for VMware vSphere. In this topic, we’ll see how to connect to vCenter and some commands to start.

When you implement a virtual infrastructure, you may want to convert your physical servers to virtual ones to improve your datacenter consolidation. In this topic, we will see how to convert a physical Linux server to a VMware VM. To make this conversion, I used VMware vCenter Converter Standalone. To host VMware vCenter Converter Standalone, you need a physical or virtual machine based on Windows Server. Usually, when I run this tool, I use a virtual machine. Then, I run the executable to process the product installation.