Backing up your Azure Virtual Machines
Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) are great. They're easy to setup, maintain, and leverage the many advantages of the cloud. Although storage devices of the VMs have redundancy you are still susceptible to a VM not booting up or becoming inaccessible due to corruption or a Windows update on the VM. When that becomes your issue the disk redundancy won't help you and your stuck with a complicated and time consuming process of rebuilding the VM. To save yourself from this rebuilding process Azure has a backup feature called Recovery Services. Recovery Services allows you to create a "Backup Vault" that you...
Azure Backup – Protect Your Data With The Cloud
If you're contemplating the Cloud, one of the easiest, cost effective ways to start is with Azure Backup. It's reliable, scalable, requires no capital expenditure, and is inexpensive. Still using tape? Unreliable, expensive, and how often do we forget to store it offsite? There are other cloud based backup systems like Crashplan and Carbonite, but their business plans can be expensive and aren't robust enough to backup VMs or integrate with System Center or other advanced tools. Protecting your data with Azure Backup is easy: Setup an Azure subscription, if you don't already have one. Setup a Backup vault in Azure. Install the free...
Windows Server 2003 is no longer supported
It's time to replace that server that has "just worked" for so many years. We all have "that" server and most likely it's running Windows 2003 and you haven't had to touch it (except Windows Update of course). Support ended for our beloved server operating system on July 14th, 2015. With that, there are no longer any security updates and you put your system at risk. Depending on what your Windows 2003 server is doing, replacing it might not be too big of a deal. However; if it's running critical services for your network like Active Directory, DNS, or other...