Microsoft – Jacobs and Company B.I.T.S.

One of the single greatest features of virtual machines is how easy it is to use for disaster recovery. If you can imagine that an entire server is nothing more than a file on a hard drive, you can easily see how easy it could be to backup and restore a virtual machine. Backup can be as simple as turning off the virtual machine, copying it to another hard drive, then turning the virtual machine back on. That’s it. No magic, no smoke and mirrors, just copy it and go just like a Word or Excel file. If you need to restore it, just copy it back, find the file with the Hypervisor software, and start it right up!

Ok, so maybe it isn’t quite that easy, because depending on how much data is packed into that file it could still take hours to make the copy of the file. What if you can’t afford to turn the server off to back it up, what then? Well, making a copy of the drive is not the only way to back up your virtual server. Backing up the server is also not the only way to recover from a disaster when you are talking about virtual machines. Virtual machines can be moved between physical servers over a network with no downtime. They can also be replicated on a regular basis to another location, and those copies of the virtual server be brought online quickly in the event of a major disaster at your office. You can force a virtual server or group of servers to move to another machine while you take a physical server down for maintenance like upgrading the memory or doing an update to the hypervisor without turning the virtual servers off and interrupting service, then move them back when you finish.

Another feature of virtual machines that helps reduce the risk of a disaster is the snapshot feature. A snapshot is a picture of everything on the virtual machine as it was when the snapshot was taken that can then be rolled back to if a problem comes up. An example would be you are installing a new version of your accounting software, you reboot the server, and before Windows loads it crashes every time you try to restart. Don’t worry. All is not lost, because you took a snapshot just before you started installing the software. Just choose the last snapshot you took in the hypervisor and roll back to it. Now it is like it never happened. If you have already experienced a bad software installation, you might consider making a copy of your virtual server and testing the installation on a copy inside a hypervisor on your laptop disconnected from your network to see if there are going to be any problems, before you do the installation live. For that matter, you could just copy the virtual machine files you tested the installation to back to your live environment and not have to go through the process of installing the software again. In this way, you have completely avoided any risk of a disaster caused by the software installation.

As much as I want you to be excited about how easy and how powerful virtual machines can be in a disaster recovery plan, it is important to note that every network is different and has different needs. The more complicated your data and applications, the more complex the disaster recovery plan will be. The plan may require all your files to still be backed up daily using standard backup software from within the guest server, or SQL databases require special scripts to be run to prepare data for backup prior to the virtual machine being backed up. There are dozens of variables that could complicate the backup and recovery process implemented for a virtual machine, and that is why it is important to work with your IT staff or a knowledgeable consultant you trust to develop and test your backup plan.

Microsoft Office got an upgrade in January — Office 2013. To say that Microsoft has its “head in the clouds” is an understatement. The new cloud-connected, cloud-delivered, cloud-centric Office is a testament to Microsoft’s dedication to moving to the cloud. Available right now, Microsoft Office 365 Home Premium is all about the cloud. This new Office is a subscription-based service, available to home users for $9.99/month or $99.00/year. In addition to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the subscription gives users access to Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access. Microsoft throws in free with the subscription an extra 20GB of cloud storage on their SkyDrive service and 60 Skype world minutes a month. Because the Home Premium subscription is a site license, you can install office on up to 5 PCs or Macs.

What makes this new version of Office so “in the cloud?” All of the documents you create default to being stored on your SkyDrive in the cloud. The latest updates to the applications, which are expected to roll out several times a year now, are available for subscribers to install as soon as they are released, so you always have the latest version. Not using one of the 5 computers covered by the subscription? Don’t worry! All of the Microsoft Office apps can be “streamed” to the computer you are using, and when you are done automatically removed, leaving almost no trace of their ever being on the system. You can also choose to use more fully-featured Office web apps directly in your browser. There are a lot of features missing from the web apps; however, new features are being added and updated all the time, allowing you to work fully in the cloud.

Also available is a subscription for college and university students, faculty, and staff. The subscription is only $79.99 for 4 years of use and allows you to install the applications on 2 PCs or Macs. Besides these 2 differences, the University subscription has the same features as the Home Premium subscription.

Students and home users are not the only ones to get a new Office subscription service. On February 27, the Office Small Business Premium subscription will be made available. This subscription gives users access to several apps and services not available to the home and educational users. Small Business Premium adds Microsoft Lync and InfoPath, as well as video conferencing, online document sharing, shared calendars, 25GB of email storage, 10GB of shared document storage, and 500MB of personal storage per user. The Small Business Premium Subscription also differs from the Home and University subscriptions in that it is a per user subscription, so for each user in your business it will cost either $12.50 per month or $149.99 annually per user.

Not interested in jumping on one of Microsoft’s new subscriptions? Microsoft has also released perpetual license versions of their Office suites and individual applications. These perpetual licenses are what we are used to seeing and buying preinstalled on our computers; however, they do not benefit from many of the extra cloud features or services associated with the new subscriptions. My guess is that over a relatively short period of time, Microsoft will begin retiring these perpetual licenses and in a few years the only choice will be one of their cloud subscriptions for Office. Personally, I think this is the way to go though I do look to Microsoft to reduce the cost of the Home Premium subscription just a little more before it becomes as attractive to home users as this model is to large corporations.