Category: Tech

Everything tech: deepdive on the most important technologies, tips and tricks for everyday’s work, tutorial, step-by-step guides, videos and manuals.

Tech

Automated Veeam Cloud Connect deployment: 1 – add all the managed servers

Luca Dell'Oca,

Everytime I receive a new version of Veeam Backup & Replication, with inside also a new Veeam Cloud Connect, I try to install it as soon as possible in my personal lab to test it. My lab is a bit complex, because it uses a dozen virtual machines, spread over multiple VLAN connected via a firewall that only allows the minimum amount of TCP/UDP ports; this is done on purpose to simulate as much as possible a real Veeam Cloud Connect installation, so that everything I test is good also for our Service Providers which I work with. This is a good thing, but it also means that each time there’s a new version of the software, especially Beta versions which don’t allow in-place upgrades, I need to uninstall and re-install everything.
This is an insanely boring and error-proned task, and because of this I recently automated almost the entire process. In this first post, I’ll show you how to add all the managed servers to the Console and install the base components.

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Tech

Good old FTP (and cloud!) to protect your vSphere environment

Luca Dell'Oca,

Lately, I had to rebuild my personal lab after a major crash of the storage system I use, and even if I was able to restore everything, the procedure I had to use involved many manual rebuilding of the resources. This time, I decided that everything has to be protected in a way that it would be really easy to perform e restore of every component of the lab. I started with the basic infrastructure based on VMware vSphere, and I realized that, as much as it sounds something from the jurassic age, the best way to create backups of those resources was to use an FTP server!

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Tech

Replication in Veeam Cloud Connect with more than 9 networks

Luca Dell'Oca,

In my previous post I explained step by step how a service provider can configure Veeam Cloud Connect Replication to allow for more than 9 internal networks. In this second part of the post, we’ll see how a tenant can replicate his virtual machines in this specific scenario, and how they can configure pfSense to allow the multiple communications between the replicated VMs and Internet.

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Tech

Configure Veeam Cloud Connect Replication with more than ten networks

Luca Dell'Oca,

Veeam Cloud Connect Replication does not only manage virtual machine replication, but also offers a complete networking solution to easily publish failed over virtual machines in case of a disaster. This has always proved to be a tremendous feature of the solution. There are however some specific use cases where the Network Extension Appliance (NEA) may be better replaced with a different solution. One of the use cases is when a tenant needs to have more than 9 virtual networks to publish his virtual machines.

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Tech

Quickly configure PhotonOS virtual machines with static IPs

Luca Dell'Oca,

Sometimes, we all need a large group of small virtual machines for our tests in vSphere. I tried in the past several linux distributions that claim to be small and easy to be deployed, but they usually failed in one of the two aspects, and it’s usually the ease of deployment. They are all fine if there’s a DHCP server around, but setting up a static IP configuration has always been a problem: mouse drivers in graphical mode are horrible, there’s little to no documentation about which distribution they are based on (in order to find out which commands and configuration files should be used), in summary, a living hell.
So, I decided to spend an afternoon doing some research and tests, and I came out with “my own” preferred procedure, based on VMware PhotonOS. It may be good for you too, or maybe not, depending on your own needs. I documented all the steps I’ve done, so that I (and you) can follow them start to end in order to obtain a working tiny VM with a static IP address.

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Tech

Disable direct file restore in Veeam vCloud Self-Service portal

Luca Dell'Oca,

The Veeam vCloud Self-Service portal (from here on, just portal) is a great solution for offereing self-service capabilities to vCloud Director tenants that want to manage by themselves backups and restores of their VMs and vApps. Service providers can already configure the service to allow tenants for different degrees of freedom, but there are some additional options that are not available in the configuration options.
I already blogged a few months ago about how to “Disable Items Restore options in Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal”, so that the ITEM tab can be completely removed from the interface. And looking at the number of visit this page has had so far, seems like several providers are alreday leveraging this “trick”.
Today however, we want to go a little bit further, and allow tenants to only download their files.

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