With the release of Data Protection Manager 2010, DPM adds significant scalability, reliability, and manageability enhancements such as:

• Up to 100 servers, 1000 laptops, or 2000 databases protected by a single DPM server

• Significant auto-protection, auto-healing, and reduced alerting for a more “fire and forget” experience

• Enhanced disaster recovery options for long-distance data protection and business continuity initiatives

Of course DPM 2010 offers key new capabilities when used with Hyper-V R2 such as:

• Protection of Live Migration-enabled servers running on CSV in Hyper-V R2

• Flexibility to protect virtual machines from Windows guests or from the hypervisor host

• Ability to restore virtual machines to an alternative host

• Host-based backups will now enable item level recovery (ILR) from within the VHD

One of the major advantages that DirectAccess has over traditional remote access solutions is that it enables IT to always be connected to their managed clients. This allows you to make sure your managed clients are always up to date and meet your desired configuration requirements. This is a far cry from the VPN client, where the VPN might never connect to the corpnet and then finally connect months later when visiting the home office and share all the worms and viruses it collected during its sojourn away for the corpnet.

Aidan Finn:This morning I read an article on Network World that I thought I’d write about.  It reported a claim by the Burton Group (yes; them again) where it was claimed that:

• You should virtualise Exchange
• You should not use Hyper-V to do it: because it does not have ordered virtual machine start-ups.

Let’s take these two, one at a time.

Jaap Wesselius: In an earlier article, based on the full version of Windows Server 2008 R2, I explained the new Live Migration option in Hyper-V R2. For security reasons it is recommended to use Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core (or Hyper-V Server) for your Hyper-V needs but, from a management perspective, using Server Core can be painful, as I recently experienced at a customer. Not only is the setup of the server itself a different process, but setting up the iSCSI Shared Storage and Remote Management are also subtly different. Time for some guidance...