Veeam Cloud Connect allows service providers to charge their costumers on the base of multiple parameters, but together with used space license consumption is surely one of the most common. This script allows service providers to configure an automatic usage reporting.
I wrote already two articles about this topic. I know that managing SSL certificates can be a cumbersome task, so any option to automate the process is a great addition to any IT administrator toolbox. This is why Let’s Encrypt certificates are becoming so popular, not just because they are free but also because the automated platform that they use allow for some amazing automation solutions. In my first article Use Let’s Encrypt free certificates in Windows for Veeam Cloud Connect I explained the basics of Let’s Encrypt technology, and how to use its certificates on a Windows machine using ACMEsharp libraries with Powershell. Then, in the second article Improved Powershell script for Let’s Encrypt certificate renewals I optimized the script even more. But still, there was room for improvement and even more automation.
More than two years ago, when we released Veeam Cloud Connect 9.0, I massively reworked my original paper on the topic, and the final result became a book available as a pdf. The book was also printed and I have some copies at home; not something to win any nobel price, but it's nice to see them there as remind me of the massive work it took. Then, the cloud was calling, and I decided it was time to make it more modern and after some re-editing and learning how markdown and github work, the book became an online resource that people can freely and easily read.
In chapter 3 of this blog series, I showed you how to connect a vCloud Director to Veeam Backup & Replication. Before Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4, the main usage of vCloud Director was to make backups of vCloud VMs. But now with Update 4, we can use vCloud Director as a target for Cloud Connect replicas.
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.