Last week, Veeam released the new Veeam Service Provider Console v4, the latest version of what was previously called Veeam Availability Console. I run my own VAC (now VSPC) environment, so I decided to take the opportunity to upgrade my lab to the latest version to learn the upgrade process.
For a new chapter of my book on Veeam Availability Console, I created a second virtual datacenter and I needed to connect the two of them together with a vpn. I have many options, like using the embedded ipsec capabilities of the NSX Edge i have at both sites, as they both run vCloud Director, but I decided to use Veeam Powered Network, in order to use this opportunity to learn more about it. And the first thing I’ve learned was how to configure the appliance with a static IP address.
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.
Last week, I explained how to manually connect standalone computers to Veeam Availability Console. This time we will try to automate this process as much as possible.
In my previous post, I talked about Veeam N2WS Backup and Recovery (known previously as CPM) and how to configure it to protect different AWS accounts. Now that the configuration is ready, it’s time to protect the virtual machines, and to export them into S3 so that we can have an offsite copy using Veeam Backup & Replication.
One of the main focus of this year for me as a cloud architect at Veeam, is to learn as much as possible about public cloud technologies, and how our software solutions can interact with them. I started a few weeks ago to deep dive into our solutions for Amazon Web Services, using N2WS Backup & Recovery. One of the things I’ve learned is how to create a dedicated account to protect other accounts.
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.
Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 has introduced a complete set of self-service capabilities for VMware vCloud Director users. Service providers can offer these features to their users, and users can perform backups and restores in a complete self-service way.
However, because of network restrictions that are often in place in vCloud Director environments, some features like Item restores are not possible. So, some service providers asked me if it was possible to remove the ITEMS tab in the portal, just to make the user experience of the portal easier. Or maybe a provider doesn’t want to offer these capabilities at all to its customers. Whatever is the use case, there’s a way to remove the tab. Just remember, this is totally unsupported!