Zen Software at Infosec We're but a few weeks away from the annual industry pilgrimage to Earls Court for the biggest of the IT and security shows in this country, InfoSecurity Europe. Each year IT professionals (and the not-so) gather at InfoSec to take in keynote talks from industry experts, strengthen relationships with customers and suppliers, keep an eye on the competition and of course, pick up plenty of promotional tat for the kids. This year will be slightly different however, as visitors will notice that the show's noticeably better than previous ones thanks to the addition of the Zen Software stand in the new exhibitor area. It's possible I'm overestimating the impact we'll have but in any case, we're genuinely pleased to be a part of the show and that we'll be down there unashamedly flogging our wares in our compact but charming booth (K94).

Over the past few years we've used a variety of different virtualisation tools but have historically always stuck to a mixture of either VMWare tools (esxi, Player and Workstation) or Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform. These have worked really well for building larger virtual server platforms but recently I was looking for a quick and easy to configure tool that I could use on my own desktop PC. I was just looking to build some simple test machines for evaluating software in a range of scenarios. After some browsing I came across Oracle VirtualBox and I must say I've been impressed with it so far.

One of the key benefits of using BackupAssist in a Hyper-V environment is that only one licence is required on the physical host server in order to perform file level backups across all of the guest machines. In this post I’m going to step through a Hyper-V scenario I come across quite frequently, and show you how to configure a single backup job to provide the following:
  1. Bare metal backup
  2. Recovery of a guest machine in its entirety
  3. Recovery of files from a guest
  4. Exchange mailboxes and near-continuous SQL backup
For this scenario the following set of licences must be purchased for one installation of BackupAssist on the Hyper-V host server. 1 x BackupAssist with Upgrade Protection 1 X Hyper-V Granular Restore Console 1 x Exchange Mailbox add-on 1 x SQL add-on

Scenario 1 – Server configuration2008-server.jpg

In this example I’ll be backing up a single 2008 Hyper-V server running two 2008 guests. VM 1 - 2008 SBS including Exchange VM 2 - 2008 Server R2 with SQL

We've seen a noticeable increase over the past few months in the number of customers performing Hyper-V backups using BackupAssist, so I'm hoping some of you will find it useful to hear about an issue we helped resolve recently. The customer was running BackupAssist on their Hyper-V host system and had initially been performing a backup of the system state and some data which was working fine, when they added the Hyper-V guest machines though, it produced this error each time: ERROR - A Volume Shadow Copy Service operation error has occurred

We were recently asked if you could recover a Windows Image Backup of a 2008 R2 server taken with BackupAssist directly to a newly created Hyper-V Virtual Machine.  This was something that should work in theory as part of the 'recover to dissimilar hardware' function of Windows image backups, but there are a few considerations that have to be met for a clean restore process. So here is the best way we have found to achieve this.