Set a static IP in VeeamPN appliance

Posted on March 31, 2020March 21, 2020 by Luca Dell'Oca Leave a comment

For a new chapter of my book on Veeam Availability Console, I created a second virtual datacenter and I needed to connect the two of them together with a vpn. I have many options, like using the embedded ipsec capabilities of the NSX Edge i have at both sites, as they both run vCloud Director, but I decided to use Veeam Powered Network, in order to use this opportunity to learn more about it. And the first thing I’ve learned was how to configure the appliance with a static IP address.

Using AWS credentials in Powershell scripts

Posted on March 24, 2020March 21, 2020 by Luca Dell'Oca Leave a comment

Lately I was updating a couple of my scripts, and when I re-used my script that automatically updates AWS records for Let's Encrypt DNS challenges, I realised that I never stored my AWS credentials anywhere, but I was just using those cached into my powershell environment. Time to have some proper credential management.

New year, new Let’s Encrypt automation: goodbye ACMEsharp, hello Posh-ACME!

Posted on January 7, 2020December 31, 2019 by Luca Dell'Oca Leave a comment

The beginning of each year, lately seems to be the time when I have to update my scripts that control the automatic management of SSL certificates. I started three years ago by learning first about Let's Encrypt certificates, and how they could have solved my needs for automatically renew (for free!) my SSL certificates. At the time I started to use ACMESharp: it seemed to be a great fit as it worked in powershell and had all the features I needed; but lately, it has lagged behind, and the move the ACME v2 was the final nail in its coffin.

Quick Tip: how an end user can find out which version of vCloud Director is using

Posted on September 18, 2019September 17, 2019 by Luca Dell'Oca

For my tests, I use a couple of vCloud Director services thanks to some really generous service providers which are also Veeam customers. From time to time, I see they upgrade their installations but as an end user is not always straight-forward to find out which version of vCloud Director is in use. But there’s a way to find out even for end users.

Veeam Availability Console and agent automatic installation

Posted on September 11, 2019September 10, 2019 by Luca Dell'Oca

Last week, I explained how to manually connect standalone computers to Veeam Availability Console. This time we will try to automate this process as much as possible.

Veeam Availability Console and standalone computers

Posted on August 27, 2019August 25, 2019 by Luca Dell'Oca

Veeam Availability Console has been designed for multiple use cases, and one of them is to manage large fleets of computers. But what about those standalone machines we have lying around? It could be the last physical server we have in the datacenter, or a laptop of a consultant that is always travelling around. How can we deal with those? I involved my family’s computers to find out.

I wrote another book! This time, about Veeam Availabiliy Console

Posted on July 23, 2019July 18, 2019 by Luca Dell'Oca

If you are subscribed to this blog via RSS, you may have noticed that May and June have been two empty months in terms of writing, and tobe honest the entire 2019 has not been so prolific as usual. This is because I worked, and I’m still working, on some large projects that took a big chunk of my time. I’m still writing these days, but the outcome is coming out in big pieces instead of weekly posts. The first one is this, about Veeam Availability Console.

Building my own virtual lab in vCloud Director with Terraform

Posted on July 9, 2019July 5, 2019 by Luca Dell'Oca

In a previous blog post I started to study Terraform, and how to connect it to vCloud Director. This time, I will build my entire lab using the same automation tool.