My Cloud-(R)Evolution

Terraform UseCase Vending

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Faced with the repetitive task of spinning up secure ‘Landing Zones’ for my Terraform projects and bootstrapping an initial Terraform codebase, I decided to create a vending machine for that. My Terraform UseCase Vending solves that problem by packaging every required building block into a single reproducible workflow.

Tip

5 learnings on Platform Engineering

Sun, 04 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past decade, I have had the opportunity to be involved in several platform developments. All were technology base-platforms in the broadest sense, but different in the details: highly regulated adoption of public cloud platforms as in-house platforms, private cloud platforms in the enterprise environment, and IaaS/PaaS platforms for managed service providers.

I thought about the key takeaways from these journeys and came up with five aspects common to all the environments and types of platforms I was involved with.

Terraform AzureRM Backend Automation

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I wrote the previous article, most of the configuration was a very unreliable powershell script. In this article I will show a Terraform project that covers the key aspects of my previous article.

Covered:

Azure Key Vault ready for Customer Managed Key Handling
Azure Key Vault Key with Rotation Policy
User Managed Identity for communication between Azure Storage Account and Azure Key Vault
Hardened Azure Storage Account with local Data Protection settings and Customer Managed Key encryption
Basic Azure Storage Account Management Policy to cleanup old Snapshots and Versions
Storage Container

NOT covered:

Terraform AzureRM Backend

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Terraform State and in particular Terraform Remote State is an essential but equally hated aspect of Terraform. In this post, I will share my design for a Terraform AzureRM Backend with a set of recommended practices to secure the Remote State destination.

The Terraform AzureRM Backend stores the state as a Blob with the given Key within the Container within the Azure Blob Storage Account. This type of backend supports state locking and consistency checking with Azure Blob Storage native capabilities.

Built with Hugo, Cloudflare and Love

Tue, 16 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As a regular reader of this blog you may have noticed, that within the last months, a lot of change happened. I got tired of maintaining a full-blown CMS, called WordPress, just to publish my blog posts. Yes, there is a huge community around WordPress and a lot of great plugins available, but on the other hand, there is a huge attack surface to maintain. I was looking for a more efficient setup to meet my requirements. After a few experiments, this site is now built with Hugo, Cloudflare and Love.

Terraform Development Pipeline

Thu, 23 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have never been a software developer and never will be, but code is for me the natural way to deploy and change infrastructure for a decade now. Infrastructure automation can be the whole spectrum from a simple PowerShell Script up to IaC manifests, written in Terraform (or Ansible, or Pupumi, etc.). At some point in this spectrum, pipelines will be an important topic. I have boiled down the value of pipelines for me in one sentence: The purpose of a development pipeline is to deploy with confidence and therefore at high frequencies. To deliver this value, a pipeline needs to include several aspects. This blog post will cover some of the components I use for my private terraform projects, in addition to an important warning.

Azure Automation with Ansible

Tue, 19 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Ansible with its huge community and broad platform support is one of the tools you should have a look at to address your cloud automation demands.

Azure Automation with Ansible can address all layers of the automation stack introduced by Gregor Hohpe in his AWS Innovate Keynote Talk. But it would be best if you decided for yourself whether it is the best tool for all these challenges.

User-Centric On-Demand Self-Service

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing highlights On-Demand Self-Service as one of the essential characteristics of the cloud model. The characteristics of the cloud model are defined independently of the Service Models (SaaS, IaaS, Paas, …) and the Deployment Models (Private cloud, Public cloud, Hybrid cloud, …).

On-demand self-service.
A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.

Veeam Azure Object Storage Automation

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

During my prior blog post, I had the requirement to spin up a lot of Azure Object Storage Repositories. As is usually the case, this quickly led me to Veeam Azure Object Storage Automation. I am pretty new to Azure automation, so this was an exciting topic. Please feel free to reach out if you are more experienced in Azure automation and see some enhancement opportunities.

Before starting my Veeam Azure Object Storage Automation journey, I first had to understand the process.

Veeam Backup target freedom of choice

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The freedom of choice regarding Backup Repositories has always been a strength of Veeam Backup & Replication. With the V12 release, the Veeam Backup target freedom of choice becomes even greater. In this article, I will take a look at the new possibilities.

In the Veeam V12 launch event, one of the main areas of innovation is titled “Data Freedom” and includes the new direct to object storage capability.

HPE Firmware Management for VMware ESXi - Server Profile Install Method

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As described in my previous blog post, the firmware deployment method needs to be configured on two components. The OneView Server Profile Install Method and the HPE Smart Update Tools Install Mode. changing the HPE OneView Server Profile or updating the Server Profile from the modified Template might be a time-consuming and annoying task without proper automation. This post will show some examples of how to use VMware PowerCLI in combination with the HPE OneVew PowerShell Module to automate these tasks.

Learning Kubernetes

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Learning Platforms

Documentation

Blog etc.

Communities

Veeam Kubernetes Korner

Container Basics

Key Container Terminology

Docker Build

The docker build command builds Docker images from a Dockerfile.

Veeam Backup Protection Levels

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Within this blog post, I will talk about the different protection levels of your Veeam backups that you can achieve with different concepts and technologies. An important role is played by what protection goals you want to achieve. I will try to elaborate a bit on which Veeam Backup Protection Levels can solve which problems.

A concept you often hear in the Veeam Backup & Replication context is the 3-2-1 rule.

HPE Firmware Management for VMware ESXi - Smart Update Tools Install Mode

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As I explained in the introduction to this series, the HPE Firmware Management for VMware ESXi includes multiple components which must be coordinated with each other. This post will show how to configure and monitor the HPE Smart Update Tools Install Mode in a comfortable manner.

Typically the HPE Smart Update Tools are shipped with the custom installation iso or are added to the default image by vLCM Vendor Addon or an additional update manager patch bundle.

HPE Firmware Management for VMware ESXi - Introduction

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In most of the VMware vSphere Environments (and even more with vSAN) the firmware and driver management is a critical and at the same level annoying task. That’s one of the reasons why All-In-One solutions like Dell EMC VxRail for VMware vSAN are very popular in large enterprises. The struggle of manually matching and updating the firmware and drivers for VMware ESXi made me write the blog post series HPE Firmware Management for VMware ESXi.

Capacity Planning Strategies

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One of the biggest challenges in managing an enterprise platform (Compute, Storage, or even platforms like OpenShift) is the Capacity Planning Strategies. It’s a huge effort to find the right strategy for the respective platform type to support the business demands as well as possible and on the other hand, keep the costs as low as possible without hitting any SLO.

I had insight into many different business models respective environments and will try to describe some of the experiences here. There is no “One Size Fits All” in Capacity Planning Strategies, so this blog post might be an inspiration for you. All comments and discussions are very welcome.

Scale-Out Application vs. NUMA Action-Affinity

Mon, 05 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Last few months I was involved in a rollout project of a large application on VMware vSphere. During the phases of the rollout, we had few tricky performance issues to solve, but one of them was pretty special. This problem was more than worth writing the article: Scale-Out Application vs. NUMA Action-Affinity

As the title suggests, the application was a typical Scale-Out Application with a lot of workers spread across a single VMware vSphere Cluster.

Veeam Backup & Replication RestAPI Ansible Collection

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

One of the highlights of the latest Veeam announcement is the Veeam Backup & Replication 11 RestAPI. Until now a RESTful API was only available for other products from Veeam, e.g. Veeam Availablity Orchestrator. Only through Veeam Enterprise Manager could users make some RESTful API calls for Veeam Backup & Replication. The focus of the Veeam Enterprise Manager RESTful API is more user-centric - Backup, Restore, add Tenant, and so on. The new Veeam Backup & Replication 11 RestAPI is currently mainly focused on infrastructure operations - add Managed Servers, create Backup Repositories, and so on. To leverage the new RestAPI fully integrated in the existing processes I have decided to create a Veeam Backup & Replication RestAPI Ansible Collection.

Service Level Objectives for vSphere Clusters

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Last few weeks I had a lot of discussions on how to make a VMware Private Cloud Environment accountable or measurable. In some situations, you need to design an environment that meets one or more Service Level Objectives (SLO) or you have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with consumers of the platform. But at least you need some measurable values to scale your environment as needed. In all of these cases, you need to define Service Level Objectives for vSphere Clusters including the related infrastructure components, and collect Service Level Indicators (SLI) so monitor the defined goals.

Script - Apply Rightsizing Recommendations

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Rightsizing of workload is always a huge topic in virtualized enterprise environments. It starts with how to get users to order the right size of VM and then eventually leads to how to Apply Rightsizing Recommendations to existing vSphere VMs. During this blog post, I mainly talk about oversized VMs, which are 95% of the Rightsizing Recommendations I have seen in various environments. Undersized VMs are often quickly identified by the application owner, but unused resources are rarely returned.

ESXi NTP Security Configuration

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

To further extend the hardening of my VMware ESXi hosts, I have been working on scripted ESXi NTP Security Configuration. I wanted to restrict access to the host’s NTP client to the configured NTP Server IPs. Per default, the host firewall is configured to allow all IPs if a service is enabled.

You can add Allowed IP Addresses for an ESXi Host via vSphere Client, vSphere Web Client, vCLI, or PowerCLI. The ESXi Host Client does currently not offer this ability.

VMware vSphere Site Availability Concepts

Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, I will discuss the various VMware vSphere Site Availability Concepts and will try to work out how each concept can be applied to data centers, sites, and vSphere clusters.

No matter which one of the possible VMware vSphere Site Availability Concepts you choose for your environment, or which mix of them fits your demands, there are some basic rules you should apply to guarantee the best possible availability and minimize the unplanned failovers.

VMware Workstation API remote access

Thu, 14 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I was really excited by Adam’s great Ansible Module for VMware Workstation. To use this Module from my Development Environment, VMware Workstation API remote access is necessary. You can configure the REST API service to provide HTTP access locally and HTTPS access both locally and remotely.

Configure REST API HTTPS

The VMware Workstation documentation highlights the use of a self-signed certificate. Another option is the use of a signed certificate generated with XCA. If you use a signed certificate you should use a PEM chain instead of a single certificate.

ESXi LLDP Uplink Details

Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A few years ago I have written a PowerCLI script to collect and report ESXi CDP informations. My use case of this script was the ability to verify the uplink redundancy of all ESXi Hosts in the inventory. It was about time to do a vendor-neutral refresh of the script. The new version of the PowerCLI function is now able to gather ESXi LLDP Uplink Details in addition to the exiting CDP possibility.

Protect new NetApp NFS Exports with Veeam

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The capability to protect NFS and SMB Shares on file level was one of the most wanted features of Veeam Availability Suite v10. With prior versions, you only had the option of NDMP Backup to Tape. The NAS Backup feature is designed for a large scale and wide compatibility. In my opinion, there is currently only a small problem with using this new feature: There is no integration like vCenter or VMM available that auto-protects all new shares in Veeam Backup & Replication. To make sure all new NetApp exports are backed up, I have created a PowerShell Function to automatically Protect new NetApp NFS Exports with Veeam.

Script - PowerCLI VM Disk Report

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I had to create VMware vSphere VMs with a whole bunch of virtual disks. The application running inside of the virtual machines required a special disk layout and placement of the disks to guarantee optimal performance. To make sure everything is fine, I created a PowerCLI VM Disk Report to verify the configuration of the vSphere VMs.

A simple example of an application that benefits of a special disk layout and placement of the disks is a basic Microsoft SQL Server. Placing “User DB” and “User LOG” on separate drives allows the I/O activity to occur at the same time for both the data and log files.

Veeam Availability Suite 10 unattended installation

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Since Veeam has recently published the Veeam ONE 10 and Veeam Backup & Replication 10 RTM Build for Partners and Service Providers, I wanted to get my Veeam Availability Suite 10 unattended installation Ansible Role ready for this major release.

Besides the necessary adjustments for Veeam Availability Suite 10, I have taken care of a problem with the SQL Express setup for Veeam ONE and Veeam Backup & Replication. I had recently discovered a problem: The setup of the SQL Express 2016 only worked fine if the user was logged in to the destination server. The Ansible community on Reddit was very helpful to get this problem solved (thanks to jborean93). It is necessary to run the setup as an explicit user. Ansible can do this via privilege escalation “become” in runas mode and the additional flag logon_type=batch.

PRTG Veeam Sensor - Retrospective

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In 2016 I never thought that almost four years later I would still be working on my PowerShell script for a PRTG Veeam Sensor. But even shortly after the release of the two blog posts there was a surprise, Paessler, the Vendor behind PRTG, asked me if they could translate my article and publish it on their site. I was then as now surprised by this attention. And against all expectations, the PRTG Veeam Sensor has continued until today.

Set persistent scratch location with PowerCLI

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In common server configurations for VMware ESXi Hosts, the boot device is usually an SD-Card or a USB stick. These devices are cheap, require very low-maintenance and have a long life as long as not much is written to them. One disadvantage of Flash or SD storage devices is, that ESXi scratch locations are not created on them. The reason for this is the potentially limited read/write cycles available. In order to still meet the VMware best practice, this blog post will show how to set a persistent scratch location with PowerCLI.

NetApp NFS Export with Ansible

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

For some time now I have been focusing more on NetApp Data ONTAP again. As usual, automation is a spotlight of my interest. NetApp offers a lot of options around automation, for example, Data ONTAP PowerShell Toolkit, ONTAP REST APIs, Ansible modules for NetApp and many more. This blog post covers how to create a NetApp NFS Export with Ansible.

NetApp is a Red Hat certified support module vendor and ships a broad range of Certified Ansible modules. At the moment only nine vendors are on the list of Ansible certified modules.

Veeam ONE unattended installation with Ansible

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

My new hobby project, Veeam ONE unattended installation with Ansible, was pretty interesting for me because of two reasons. First of all, I’ve never taken a closer look at Veeam ONE and I wanted to use the opportunity to rewrite my old playbook for the Veeam Backup & Replication unattended installation as Ansible Role. Many thanks to Michael Cade, who inspired me for this nice project.

Ansible Roles are a great framework to ship a predefined set of variables, tasks, files, templates, and modules. The tasks and modules within the Ansible Role can be used by other Playbooks. An Example for complete modules inside a role is my Ansible Veeam PowerShell Module. This blog post will show how Roles can be used to define sequences of tasks for a specific use case.

Veeam and vSphere Tag Integration with Ansible

Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

VMware vSphere Tags are a great tool to build a deep integration with other VMware or third-party products. Veeam already could use vSphere Tags as a backup object in Veeam Backup & Replication 8.0 Update 2b (Thanks to Jim Jones and Luciano Patrão for helping me out with this info). This article will show how a Veeam and vSphere Tag Integration with Ansible can be done. I would like to demonstrate at first what is possible with the Ansible standard community modules and then also the possibility to create a Veeam backup job with vSphere Tags as a backup object with my own Ansible Veeam module.

Ansible Veeam Modules Preview

Tue, 09 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Creating an initial set of Ansible Veeam modules has been my goal for a while. It was clear that this had to be possible with the Ansible concept of Windows modules written in Powershell. A Veeam Backup & Replication server needs to be a Windows Server and the Veeam console is shipped with a feature-rich PowerShell SnapIn, which can be used by the Ansible Windows modules written in Powershell.

Veeam unattended installation with Ansible

Mon, 17 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

There are already a lot of great projects out there for the Veeam unattended installation. One of the most advanced projects is for sure the Chef cookbook for Veeam Backup and Replication. I myself have also already worked on that topic, and have done some rework of the PowerShell script from Timothy Dewin. The Veeam unattended installation with Ansible is the next evolution of my prior project (Veeam unattended installation with PowerShell)and the first step for further Veeam integration into Ansible.

vSphere VM Security Configuration with Ansible

Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Since security is a requirement for the complete infrastructure stack, we will cover the vSphere VM Security Configuration with Ansible in this article. One of my prior posts has already covered the VMware ESXi Security Configuration with Ansible and is a good starting point when you are new to this topic.

VM Security Configuration

The vSphere 6.7 Update 1 Security Configuration Guidehas different subject areas regarding VM Security Configuration: Configure only the minimum required devices, disable unexposed features, limit the information you collect and disable non-essential features. I have additionally added the use of UEFI Secure Boot, if possible.

CA signed vCenter Certificate from XCA

Mon, 13 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

For a small lab or test environment is a full CA setup far too much effort. So, I have decided to create a new root and intermediate CA with XCA and request a CA signed vCenter Certificate from XCA. The requested certificate should be used to replace the vCenter default Machine SSL certificate.

Requirements for all imported vCenter 6.7 certificates:

Key size: 2048 bits or more (PEM encoded)
PEM format. VMware supports PKCS8 and PKCS1 (RSA keys). When you add keys to VECS, they are converted to PKCS8.
x509 version 3
SubjectAltName must contain DNS Name=machine_FQDN
CRT format
Contains the following Key Usages: Digital Signature, Key Encipherment.
Enhanced Key Usage can be either empty or contain Server Authentication.

Source: Certificate Requirements for Different Solution Paths

VMware ESXi Security Configuration with Ansible

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If you read the vSphere 6.7 Update 1 Security Configuration Guide you will agree that the security configuration of VMware ESXi hosts is mostly about managing services, advanced options, firewall rules, and lockdown mode. The Ansible Community has created all the modules required to do the VMware ESXi Security Configuration with Ansible.

This blog post is based on the environment created within a prior article: My Ansible Development Setup

ESXi Security Configuration Tasks

I have chosen most of the ESXi configuration options from the vSphere 6.7 Update 1 Security Configuration Guide and created a Playbook to enforce the VMware ESXi Security Configuration with Ansible.

My Ansible Development Setup

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I started digging into the Ansible universe. One of the first things I learned was the need for a proper Ansible Development Setup. My common Ansible playbooks are focused on VMware vSphere and the ecosystem around a proper deployment workflow (IPAM, CI, DNS and so on). However, this blog post should only cover a few general topics and not specific integrations.

Ansible Control Machine

I have decided to use a simple CentOS 7 VM as Ansible Control Machine for my home lab.

Atlassian Bamboo PowerShell Pester Integration

Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Some time ago I have moved one of my PowerShell projects to a new Atlassian Bitbucket server with Bamboo connection for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. To continue using my existing code validation scripts I was looking for a Bamboo PowerShell Pester Integration. For the interoperability both tools, Pester and Bamboo, can handle Test-Results in NUnit XML format.

My example plan is configured with default Bamboo settings and some additional variables which are used for the detailed integration tests of the project (not covered by this blog post).

Dashboard - Host vCPU to Core Allocation Ratio

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

With the release of the vRealize Operations Manager 7.0, VMware has changed the capacity planning behavior of the product. The vRealize Operations Manager 7.0 does not anymore make the Host vCPU to Core Allocation Ratio visible for the user. I know that Host vCPU to Core Allocation Ratio is with vSphere 6.5 and newer not anymore a valid capacity planning indicator but in my opinion, it`s still an interesting SLA.

Script - Create VMware vSphere NetApp NFS Volume

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I started to write a PowerShell Function that creates an optimized VMware vSphere NetApp NFS Volume and mounts this new volume to all VMware ESXi hosts within a vSphere Cluster. During the scripting process, I found, that a lot of NetApp specific inputs are required to process these steps. This was the perfect project to finally play with Dynamic ValidateSets in Dynamic Parameters. Fabian Wendlandt already created a great example for the usage of Dynamic ValidateSets in Dynamic Parameters with his Switch-VMSwitch script.

vRealize Orchestrator - Manage Host Lockdown Mode and SSH Service

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Most of the time does a high security standard not make you daily operation tasks easier, but anyway, a high security standard is necessary for a VMware Enterprise Environment. You can support the daily operation tasks with tools like VMware vRealize Orchestrator or VMware vRealize Operations Manager. This article will show how to Manage Host Lockdown Mode and SSH Service with vRealize Orchestrator Workflows. To make these workflows easily accessible, the vCenter Server extension is a great setup.

vRealize Operations Tenant App 2.0 for vCloud Director

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Beside vRealize Operations Manager 7.0 has VMware also released the vRealize Operations Tenant App 2.0 and the vCloud Director Management Pack 5.0. These three releases form together with the NSX Management Pack a great tool for VMware Service Providers and there Tenants. The vRealize Operations Tenant App 2.0 for vCloud Director now delivers beside the known monitoring capabilities now additional pricing tools.

vCloud Director Dynamic Security Group with Tag

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Within a past project I was working on a topic that was covered by Daniel Paluszek in his blog post Security Compliance – Pre-configure your vApp firewall rules inside vCloud Director using NSX DFW (Part 1 of 2). But I had slightly different goals than Daniel, I had the premise to represent the whole configuration inside the vCloud Director user interface and the naming of the virtual machines was needed to be flexible. So to the concept of Dynamic Security Group with Tag was born. VMware NSX Security Groups and Security Tags can also be used in vCloud Director multi tenancy environments.

Veeam log file analysis with PowerShell

Tue, 11 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I did an Update of the Veeam Backup & Replication environment in my Lab. After the update I wanted to make sure everything went fine and started analyzing all event logs and file logs during and after the update. I quickly realized that the Veeam log file analysis without a proper tool will take a while. Since my last public PowerShell project was already a few month ago (and I was looking for a use case for PowerShell Classes), I have started to create a Function for the Veeam log file analysis with PowerShell.

NSX Troubleshooting - Management and Control Plane

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first article of my VMware NSX Troubleshooting series. I am aware that already a lot of other blog post around this topic have been published, but for me this post is also a part of my learning process in VMware NSX. Writing about a topic helps me to get a deeper understanding of my existing knowledge gaps. I will start this series of posts with the NSX Management and Control Plane

Compare installed VMware ESXi VIBs

Mon, 03 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Last Week I had to analyze a huge VMware vSphere environment regarding configuration issues and risks. One of the challenges was to Compare installed VMware ESXi VIBs, to make sure not only the kernel but all packages are identical on the Hosts within the Cluster. Different packages on the VMware ESXi hosts are not necessarily a problem but a huge risk. An unused (not loaded) driver VIB for example is no risk, but different NIC driver versions on the Hosts in a VMware NSX enabled Cluster are a huge problem.

PowerShell Module for Veeam Availability Orchestrator

Wed, 20 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As a VMware Site Recovery Manager enthusiast I was very interested in the new Veeam Availability Orchestrator. And finally I found the time to deploy and configure the new rising start in the Veeam Software portfolio. Even in version 1.0 the Veeam Availability Orchestrator is already a great product and will help a lot of customers to create a reliable Disaster Recovery concept. During my configuration process I was wondering that there is no PowerShell Module for Veeam Availability Orchestrator available. But wait there is an API, so I started to create my own PowerShell Module.

PowerShell Module for vCloud Director NSX API

Sat, 26 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

With vCloud Director 8.20 has VMware started to let the tenants and admins consume NSX function via the vCloud Director API endpoint. The NSX function in vCloud Director are only a subset of the native NSX features but the API is identical. To leverage the API and the features itself more comfortable I have started to create my own PowerShell Module for vCloud Director NSX API.

Upload and Install ESXi Patch via PowerCLI

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The Script I have created a few weeks ago is a little bit more than a simple Upload and Install ESXi Patch via PowerCLI. The Script uses for the installation of the Patch Bundle the VMware PowerCLI ESXCLI v2 Cmdlet (no SSH Connection for esxcli). This method forces the installation of the VIBs in the Patch Bundle and allows also a downgrade of the Version. The Install-VMHostPatch Cmdlet, which is common for the Patch installation with PowerCLI, only applies version updates and does not force a downgrade of a VIB.

Grafana Dashboard for vCloud Director

Sun, 18 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

One of the points on my bucket list for 2018 was to learn more about Grafana. So I decided to create my own Grafana Dashboard for vCloud Director. Like my vCloud Director Tenant HTML Report should the Dashboard also work from Tenant perspective. As further requirements I have decided that Ubuntu should be the platform and no external data sources should be required.

With this list of requirement I did some research to find the best fitting tools. I decided to use InfluxDB as Data Source for Grafana and Telegraf as Collector Agent. Telegraf uses Input Plugins to gather data. With the Exec Input Plugin Telegraf is able to execute a script and use the output as metric data. With PowerShell Core multi-platform support also a PowerShell script is possible, which is my preferred scripting language.

Veeam Integration with vRealize Operations Manager

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

To keep control of a complex Datacenter good monitoring tools are necessary. In my opinion one of the major feature of a good monitoring solution is the capability to correlate data from different sources. VMware vRealize Operations Manager is a great solution if you run a VMware based SDDC with a mix of VMware and Partner Products. You can out of the box correlate metrics from VMware NSX, VMware vSphere, VMware VSAN and a lot of other VMware Products. But also integration of Third-Party solutions like the Blue Medora NetApp Storage Management Pack are possible. In most VMware SDDC`s also Veeam Backup & Replication is in use, so I tried to create a Veeam Integration with vRealize Operations Manager. I need to mention that Veeam offers with Veeam ONE also their own monitoring solution with a deep VMware vSphere and Veeam Integration. But in complex datacenter designs with a wide range of products that need to be integrated VMware vRealize Operations Manager is more flexible at this point.

vRealize Operations Manager - Datastore Overprovisioning

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Overprovisioning is a huge topic if you need to run a efficient environment. Especial Storage Overprovisioning has a lot of positive but also a few negative aspects, if you not have a good monitoring concept you will see more negative aspects. This article will guide you through my implementation of a Datastore Overprovisioning monitoring with VMware vRealize Operations Manager.

Efficient Veeam NetApp Backup from Storage Snapshot

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As a part of a larger Veeam project I was looking for the most efficient Veeam setup with minimal impact to the whole virtualization and storage environment during the backup window. The main requirement was to deliver constant performance at any time. My tests quickly turned out, that the Veeam NetApp Backup from Storage Snapshot is the best transport mode to reach this goal.

What means efficient in this context:

About me

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is my personal blog about my experiences, setbacks and insights on the way from the Private Cloud to the Multi Cloud.

Mastodon (preferred social network)
BlueSky (looks interesting but is currently rarely used)
LinkedIn
Reddit

Community and other profiles

Using PowerShell to create a vCloud Director Tenant HTML Report

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As we all know, VMware vCloud Director is a widely adopted IaaS platform for the service provider market. VMware vCloud Director offers a self-service web portal to manage your vApps, VMs, networks, and network functions (Edge Firewall, NAT, VPN, Load Balancer, DFW, and Rrouting). But there is also a RESTful API, and a PowerShell Module offered for the administrators and tenants. With the help of the API, some third- party vendors offer an extended web portal (for example, OnApp). In this article, I’ll show you how to use the VMware vCloud Director PowerShell Module (part of the famous VMware PowerCLI) to extend the default UI with a vCloud Director Tenant HTML Report for your most important objects. Unfortunately, there is no reporting option offered by the self-service web portal itself.

Links

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Collection of useful sources, tools and great blogs.

Search