In the first three posts of this series I've showed you how to automate the building of a Veeam Cloud Connect environment. Now that the environment is ready, today we'll automate also the onboarding of new customers.
In the previous posts we completed the automatic configuration of the Veeam Cloud Connect environment. In this third post of this short series, we will add additional resources in order to offer replication services. In fact, all the Cloud Connect components are now successfully deployed, so Backup services can already be offered, but to offer also replication services we need to connect our environment to the virtualized platform. Historically, Veeam Cloud Connect supported VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, but since the soon-to-come 9.5 Update 4 will also add support for VMware vCloud Director, we will see how to add both to the infrastructure.
In my previous post, I explained how to automatically add all the different managed server to a Veeam Cloud Connect installation. The servers are now all listed in the Console, but still no role has been assigned to them. That’s what we will do together in this post.
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.
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!
In a previous post I explained how to publish VAC (Veeam Availability Console) web service over Internet, to allow administrators and tenants to consume it. This time, we’ll complete the publishing by adding a proper SSL certificate to the Web Interface.
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.
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.