Acronis Storage Gateway is the HCI solution from Acronis. The solution, which is provided to partners, allows to build a cluster of storage and computing nodes that can become both the target for the Acronis CyberProtect service, that is an on-premise storage solution for backups, but also an hyper-converged solution that allows to deploy a wide range of storage and computing services, including virtual machines.

In this post we will describe how to perform a typical maintenance operation for the Backup Storage service, that is the removal of a node from the cluster. It happens, as in our case, when you want to decommission a node that you’re going to replace either [...]

We have been fighting for months with a weird behaviour where Windows Server 2022 all of sudden was becoming no more accessible via RDP after a while. That was happening only on some VMs, not all of them.

The symptom was simple: you were trying to connect to a Windows Server 2022 server hosted in a VM, the RDP connection screen was showing to you the classic certificate warning and when you decide to go on server was logging you in for a very short time then the connection crashed. We were able to login via Hyper-V console but RDP was no-go. Nothing was working while the fact you were correctly logging in was proved by the fact that another session started from Hyper-V [...]

A few months ago we decided to change the configuration of some of our virtualization servers that were using Hyper-V replica to create replicas that could be used in case of a disaster. We used to replicate such machines so we could restore them quickly in case of issues or even start them on the destination host, if needed.

I will deal with the reasons why we decided to switch technology, from Hyper-V replica to Windows Storage Replica, in a different, bigger post but one thing we noticed quite soon during our first migrations was that sometimes our replicated volumes were apparently hanging in a WaitingForDestination status. As the name implies, it seemed that such [...]

You might find youserlf in a situation where you need to clear Powershell command history. For example, for us it was needed because we needed to prepare templates for virtual machines deployment and we needed to activate a specific software before finalizing the template.

Unfortunately you need to type a command to enter the code and activate the software and those templates could be used by our customers that might be able to retrieve the correct code by simply striking arrow-up. If you look for a solution you will find that Powershell has a specific command to do that:

However, you might find that this won’t solve your problem. Some [...]

Microsoft released Windows Server 2022 a few weeks ago. It did so earlier than expected, which is pretty odd, but it seems that the development of new features was already complete and mature so there was no point to wait a few months more. The last sentence pretty much explains the current status of Windows Server: so few changes, albeit interesting ones, that the product can be released months earlier than planned and without much fanfare.

While generally speaking the development of new features and functionalities for server applications mostly moved out of the base operating system and while we can also concede that Windows Server has many features at the OS level so [...]