Author: Luca Dell'Oca

Luca Dell’Oca, 2011/2012/2013 VMware vExpert,works in IT since 2000. Since 2006, he’s working as a virtualization consultant and architect, specialized in the design and management of VMware infrastructures. He is also a co-founder and board member of the Italian VMware User Group, and author of the blog www.virtualtothecore.com, where he regularly publishes articles on everything related to virtualization.

Tech

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.