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

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

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.

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.

Learning how to use terraform in vCloud Director

Posted on April 2, 2019April 3, 2019 by Luca Dell'Oca

Lately, I took the decision to do not have anymore a physical lab, even if it was already hosted and managed at a service provider, but to completely nest it inside a vCloud Director tenancy. But while I was planning the rebuild operation, I also decided it was time to make its creation process as automated as possible, and while doing so, I learned a bit about how to use Terraform.

Automatic restore of multiple machines from Veeam to AWS

Posted on February 26, 2019February 25, 2019 by Luca Dell'Oca

A couple of weeks ago I presented to a customer Veeam's integration with AWS services, specifically the Direct Restore to EC2 feature. He was really interested, but he also immediately thought about possible large scenarios of this feature. This solution is not a Disaster Recovery technology, since a machine is not replicated into EC2, ready to be powered on, but it's rather a backup that is uploaded and then imported into EC2. But still, massive migrations or the creation of dev/test environments from a production copy were really nice use cases.