I've been heads down on all sorts of things, including preparing for two sessions at TechEd next week. If you're heading to New Orleans, be sure to check out these two sessions next week at TechEd in New Orleans covering mixed environments: Code Session Room Day Time ...

So I’ve been busy the last two week getting ready for TechEd (WAHOO!) where I’m co-presenting two sessions this year.  One of the sessions is all about Linux on Hyper-V.  To get ready, I’ve been working though lots of the common operational tasks including (as you know P2V) migrations. I mentioned...

I had this whole post all ready to go, then my lab took a power hit (poof!). At least I know what to write again! Anyhow, I received a great comment on the other “Windows Server Expert” blog about CSV and Live Migration. I had mentioned in a post about the value of Hyper-V backup that CSV is not required...

Happy New Year! I’ve received several questions and comment about backing up VMs that reside on CSV volumes. In short, you can do it, but it’s tricky. There’s a great post on the DPM Insider blog about the challenges ( Here ). Host-based backup of CSV-base VMs works with DPM 2010 and other tools...

In the last few posts I showed you a simple (and low cost ) manual method for back and recovery of virtual machines running on Hyper-V. When I ran through the process in my lab, I purposely used two different types of virtual machines: one Windows VM with a VSS-aware OS and enabled integration...

In my last post I showed you how to create a consistent backup of a Hyper-V host using the no additional cost Diskshadow command and an attached USB drive (in contrast to the costly VMware Consolidated Backup). Now I want to show you how to restore the VMs that you backed up to a separate host (what...

I mentioned in my last post the diskshadow command line tool that was introduced in Windows Server 2008. Jose Barreto did a nice job over viewing the command in his blog , so I won't cover the same ground. I’m going to walk you through how I use diskshadow to create a consistent, restorable, consolidated...

Microsoft introduced the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) as part of Windows Server 2003 . VSS lets you coordinate necessary actions to create a consistent point-in-time copy (also known as a shadow copy or snapshot ) of data for backup purposes. It allows you to create manual or automatic backup snapshots...

I speak with lots of customers about virtualization every week. I’m always interested in how they manage their virtual environment, and often dig into their operational procedures and practices. I find that organizations who adopted virtualization earlier have not taken full advantage of the technology...