Things continue apace at Swan Lake.\u00a0 I’ve been fooling around with various things and I’m slowly rolling in the changes that I and they want to see in place.\u00a0 It’s a slow process as I have to grab time to do things where and how I can but things are rolling forward and that is good!<\/p>\n
In this short post\u00a0 I want to talk about two tools that\u00a0 I have been using at Swan Lake that are free and really quite useful.<\/p>\n
The first tool is Altaro Backup for Hyper-V or, as it is now called, Altaro VM Backup.\u00a0 I got Swan Lake onto the free version of Altaro as part of my revamp of their server platform and, for a free product, I’m pretty pleased with how it works.\u00a0 I have Altaro installed on the main Hyper-V host and it backs up to an SMB share off another server.\u00a0 In turn, the contents of the SMB share are copied out once per week to a series of USB drives and those are stored off site.<\/p>\n
The free version of Altaro allows you\u00a0to back up\u00a0\u00a0two VM’s on a given host with no license cost.\u00a0 You cannot restore individual files with the free version but you\u00a0can back up\u00a0\u00a0and restore the full<\/em> VM with very little effort.\u00a0 In fact, I tested Altaro recovery at my house using an old PC that I loaded with a demo copy of Server 2012 R2.\u00a0 Once that was loaded I installed the free Altaro software, plugged in one of the Swan Lake USB drives, scanned the drive with Altaro then restored one of the VM’s to the PC.\u00a0 The process was quick and very painless and I had\u00a0the restored VM up and running within minutes of running the restore.\u00a0 The Altaro GUI is pretty intuitive and they don’t “clog things up” with options that you don’t need.\u00a0 For Swan Lake, they know<\/em> that they can recover systems now with very little effort and that there is a way for them to survive “system disasters”.\u00a0 In the near future they will be buying full Altaro licensing so that they have a complete and fully rounded backup solution in place but, for now, the full VM recovery abilities of the free Altaro product are a godsend.<\/p>\n If you are a non-profit and if you run in a virtualized world you could do far worse than to rely on the free version of Altaro VM Backup to ensure your data and systems are safe.\u00a0 Highly recommended.<\/p>\n The second tool is Clonezilla.\u00a0 Frankly, I’m getting a bit of a softspot for this utility as I play around with it and discover more of its abilities.\u00a0 We’ve been trying to clean up and standardize things on the workstations at Swan Lake.\u00a0 For now, all systems run (and will continue to run) Win7 Professional.\u00a0 All the systems are running OEM Win7 so I decided to create a “generic” Win7 image and then use Clonezilla to clone the image to machines as we roll\u00a0through the machine cleanup process.\u00a0 Anything that can save time in the process is welcome and, so far, I’ve cloned three workstations using my image and have not run into any issues.\u00a0 I don’t mind having to add a driver or two manually to a machine after it has been cloned as that process is so much shorter than doing the Windows patch and update dance on every single machine.<\/p>\n I’m not trying to say that Clonezilla is a panacea but, for a free tool, it is solid and it definitely is a time saver if used correctly.\u00a0 Spending some time with the tool and then making a few images for deployment could save you\u00a0 a lot of time overall.\u00a0 One thing that I am really “hot” on is the ability to quickly refresh a machine once the decision is made that a refresh (reload) is required.\u00a0 Too many techs spend too much time trying to figure out what went wrong and how to clean up a given machine when, to be blunt, you should just shoot the machine in the head.\u00a0 Cleanup is a mugs game, just refresh the wretched thing and be done with it.\u00a0 Clonezilla (and its kin) make refreshing a much more viable option.\u00a0 Also highly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"