For a project I’m working on these weeks, I’ve been asked to demonstrate how an external system (a Cloud Management Platform, an Automation tool, else) can automatically create backups for some specific virtual machines without interacting with the Veeam console. This blog post will show you how, using vSphere Moref IDs.
One year ago I built a complete and dedicated lab in order to permanently test and demonstrate Veeam Cloud Connect. The lab had been designed to operate as a production environment, and was also used for the Veeam Cloud Connect book I wrote. After a year, my SSL certificate was about to expire, so I […]
As I’m studying Ansible, one of my goal is to manage my several Windows machines with it. I know it sounds strange as Ansible was first designed to deal with Linux systems, but this powerful configuration management platform supports Windows since version 1.7, and is completely agentless: it relies on SSH for linux/unix machines, and Windows Remote Management (WinRM) for Windows machines. Through WinRM, Ansible can connect to Windows machines ard run PowerShell scripts. The idea of using Powershell as the main code to execute tasks in Windows systems, together with the agentless approach, made me be even more curious in learning more about the Windows support.
VeeamHub is a new github repository for the Veeam community, curated by Veeam engineers and architects. Here you can find scripts and other useful code.
In 2012 I published a post with a Powershell script to be able to check all the available VM’s in a given vSphere environment, and verify which ones were protected by Veeam Backup & Replication. Time to update the script to make it work with the latest versions of the two software.
The best part of the new Veeam Standalone Console is the fact that Veeam PowerShell snap-in installs as part of this component, and it includes a new cmd-let: Connect-VBRServer. YES! No more PowerShell remoting to invoke your Veeam PowerShell scripts.
When you have to deal with a large environment and several jobs in Veeam, automation via powershell is the only possible solution.
In powershell, in order to use credentials to authenticate against different systems you have different options. When running scripts interactively, we can configure the powershell command to ask us for username and password, but saving passwords in clear text into a script is a bad security practice. Powershell however has a way to hide passwords in commands and scripts.