Orchestrator is a workflow management solution for the data center. Orchestrator lets you automate the creation, monitoring, and deployment of resources in your environment. Orchestrator is also known as “SCORCH” or “SCO”. Orchestrator uses a drag and drop graphical interface to allow admins to define runbooks. A runbook is a compilation of routine procedures and operations that Orchestrator will run depending on your scheduling. Finally, Orchestrator is capable of managing multiple operating systems. After reading this guide, you should have a basic understanding of how to upgrade/install Orchestrator.

One of the things I come across time and again is a lack of monitoring in what are supposed to be corporate environments. I am honestly surprised at how little monitoring is carried out on infrastructure. These days, it is quite possible to carry out some very in-depth monitoring by using a freely available software on Linux and Windows. In this article, I’m going to go through the various monitoring tools that I use to monitor both production and my lab environment.

Tapes have been on the “backup market” for a long time and still are considered as a good option to store and secure a high amount of backup data. However, the continuous increase of backup size becomes a bottleneck in terms of fitting backup windows and reduces a simplicity and redundancy of backup solutions. Today more and more companies consider backing up their production data to more reasonable storage solutions, like Clouds. Here comes in hand the technology that emulates physical tapes on top of inexpensive, fast, and high-capacity spindle drives.

Microsoft is transforming the Azure Backup platform into a reliable solution for managing the virtual machines protection after all Azure Backup is one of the “low-hanging fruits” available for IT admins that want to start trying cloud solutions. Now they are previewing the Azure Backup pre-checks to guarantee a clean and straightforward process when you are protecting your workloads.

The reason for writing this article was the goal of eliminating any possible confusion in the process of configuring the StarWind Virtual Tape Library in pair with the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager. The integration of SCDPM provides a benefit of consolidating the view of alerts across all your DPM 2016 servers. Alerts are grouped by disk or tape, data source, protection group and replica volumes, which simplifies troubleshooting. The grouping functionality is further completed with the console capable of separating issues that only affect one data source from problems that impact multiple data sources. Alerts are also separated into backup failure or infrastructure problems.

It is quite surprising how many companies migrate virtual workload nowadays. There could be different reasons – expiring contract with the service provider, move to the new office, consolidation of resources to minimize Capex and Opex, but in every case, companies need efficient and flexible V2V migration solution. Very often people think of migration in terms of moving data from one place to another. However, migration is much more than that. For instance, you would probably want VMs to keep the same IP addresses after the migration. Which means you need to consider stretching VLANs between the source and target locations in case you cannot migrate all VMs in particular subnet in one go. You must plan a network cutover too.

Veeam Backup Entreprise Manager is an optional component that enables to consolidate several Veeam Backup & Replication server through a single pane of glass. Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager provides a web-based interface to centrally control and manage all jobs. You can edit job, monitor them and have a consolidated view of the reporting of all Veeam Backup & Replication server. In this topic, we’ll see how to configure Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager.

The reason for writing this post was a recent case from one of our customers, who ran into an issue when their SAN switch failed. The problem was that their VMs were generating an enormous amount of errors that were caused by the switching of active paths at the time of failover.

As most of you are probably aware, Gitlab is, in part, a source code hosting repository which suffered something of a major outage just a few weeks ago. Unusually, they posted a very full and frank report on what actually happened. It’s very rare for a company to do this and even rarer for it to be made public, I wish more companies would do this, even if it was just an internal review with the blame put on the process, it would at least highlight where the weaknesses are in the infrastructure.