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Disable direct file restore in Veeam vCloud Self-Service portal

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca

The Veeam vCloud Self-Service portal (from here on, just portal) is a great solution for offereing self-service capabilities to vCloud Director tenants that want to manage by themselves backups and restores of their VMs and vApps. Service providers can already configure the service to allow tenants for different degrees of freedom, but there are some additional options that are not available in the configuration options.
I already blogged a few months ago about how to “Disable Items Restore options in Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal”, so that the ITEM tab can be completely removed from the interface. And looking at the number of visit this page has had so far, seems like several providers are alreday leveraging this “trick”.
Today however, we want to go a little bit further, and allow tenants to only download their files.

Pre-built Windows virtual machines

Posted on by Luca Dell'Oca

Virtual appliances are one of the coolest and most useful little things that you can use in a virtualized environment. Whenever you need to quickly test a new software, a new platform, it’s always nice and welcomed when its creator puts out a pre-configured appliance for it. No time “wasted” to install and configure the underlying operating system and all the needed libraries, the virtual machine is ready to be powered up and used.

This has always been the case for software based on Linux, because its redistribution license has always granted the possibility to easily repackage it and distribute the final appliance. With Microsoft however, this has always been a problem. Software based on Microsoft platform cannot be easily packaged that way.

Lately, however, I found a great solution to have at least the whole operating system up and running in few minutes.