Using AWS Simple Email Service (SES) as an SMTP relay for different software solutions

Many software solutions allow for sending reports, warnings, alarms and many other communications via email. This is a great feature to keep track of what’s happening to your installations without having to log into all of them, but having an email server at our disposal these days is not so common anymore. that’s what happened to me last week, and since I was tired to use my personal Gmail account to send myself emails, I decided it was time to find a different solution and to test AWS SES.

Migrate vApps between vCloud Director installations using Veeam

In the last weeks I migrated my personal lab to a new location, with new servers and all. I took the opportunity to rebuild some of the test machines I had in my previous one, but one cumbersome and boring task is always to recreate the virtual machines used to do demos, where different applications are deployed and configured to make the demo more “real”; things like Oracle databases, websites, file servers and so on. As both the platforms at source and destination use VMware vCloud Director, I took this opportunity to learn more about migrating vApps from one vCloud to the other, using Veeam Backup & Replication.

Reconfigure NSX to allow vCloud Director to create Org networks

If you have just deployed vCloud Director over NSX , it may happen that during the creation of a new VCD network, the operations fails with the error “Cannot deploy organization VDC network; Make sure vShield Manager infrastructure is properly configured and there are segment IDs available.” In this case, you need to change the configuration of the NSX transport zones from Multicast to either Hybrid or Unicast.

Use vCloud Director LDAP authentication with Veeam self-service portal

I got this request from a colleague, who was helping out a service provider with this scenario: vCloud Director is using an external LDAP service, coming from a local Microsoft Active Directory, to authenticate all vCD users. Is Veeam vCloud Director Self-Service portal able to use this authentication and allow those users to use the portal? Let’s find out (hint: yes it works!).