Virtual To The Core

Migrate WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) to a new computer

Luca Dell'Oca, May 7, 2025

Recently I received a new company laptop, so among other things I wanted to migrate my existing WSL installation with Ubuntu 22.04. I didn’t want to reinstall and reconfigure all the software in the virtual machine, so I looked for ways to migrate the entire system.
Here’s the process, you will find out it’s very straightforward!

Tech

Pass keystrokes to a pfSense virtual machine to install it automatically

Luca Dell'Oca, March 28, 2024March 27, 2024

In my previous post I showed how to install automaticaly a virtual machine with pfSense. The automation I reached was around 90%, as I didn’t know how to automate the installation of the software. Thanks to Michael Zenzmaier who suggested me the Set-VMKeystrokes function created by William Lam I was able to also automate the installation. This solution is also a great example to automate every situation where we need to send keystrokes to a vSphere VM.

Tech

Automatically deploy pfSense with Terraform and Ansible

Luca Dell'Oca, March 13, 2024March 27, 2024

My vSphere Lab has multiple networks, and even if I have NSX available, I usually prefer the simplicity of a small virtual appliance that acts as the firewall to securely connect all those networks, simulating a secure environment. I always used pfSense for this scope, as it is very powerful and yet very simple to use. I need to focus my lab time on things I need for my job, so the quickness of pfSense has always been an advantage. From time to time I need to rebuild my lab, and even if I have some configuration backups to restore pfSense, I wanted to see if I could automate the deployment and configuration of my pfSense appliance.
I was able to automate 99% of the process. Here’s how.

Tech

My Automated Lab project: #6 Create a S3 Bucket with Terraform

Luca Dell'Oca, October 24, 2023

To complete my setup, once I deployed all my virtual machines in the previous articles, I also need a S3 bucket to be later used in Veeam as an object storage. And obviously, I can also automated this part with Terraform.

Tech

My Automated Lab project: #5 Deploy a Linux vSphere VM with Terraform and custom disks

Luca Dell'Oca, October 17, 2023October 17, 2023

After deploying a Windows VM in the previous article, this time I will deploy a Linux VM to be used as a Veeam Hardened Repository. Since I need some more space for storing the backup, I will use this opportunity to create the VM with a additional disks.

Tech

My Automated Lab project: #4 Deploy the VMs from templates using Terraform

Luca Dell'Oca, October 10, 2023October 6, 2023

After I have created my templates with Packer in the previous posts, I can now use them every time as a quick source for creating my own virtual machines. Thanks to Terraform, I’ll be able to deploy each new vm in a matter of minutes, and also to customize each of them as I need.

Tech

My Automated Lab project: #3 Create a Windows Server 2019 template in VMware vSphere with Packer

Luca Dell'Oca, October 3, 2023September 26, 2023

In my previous post I’ve created a Ubuntu template into VMware vSphere using Packer. Time to build now a Microsoft Windows template.

Tech

My Automated Lab project: #2 Create a Ubuntu template in VMware vSphere with Packer

Luca Dell'Oca, September 26, 2023September 23, 2023

In my previous post I explained the tools I use in my lab automation. Today, we’ll talk about creating Ubuntu templates into VMware vSphere. For this, I will use Packer.