One of the most common question I receive in regard to Veeam Cloud Connect, is “What’s the size I should configure for my Veeam server”? Usually, we answered this question using our sizing tools and our best practices, but lately I found a different and probably even better answer, thanks to our big data.
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.
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.