For those interested in Configuration Management and those that are looking to use these tools to also set established rules from which your infrastructure management software should adhere to including your backup software for creation, deployment, maintenance and deletion. There has been an on going community project happening where the CHEF Cookbook that was released firstly back in 2018 has been maintained mostly by one contributor Jeremy Goodrum and you will find his other contributions over on his GitHub. You can find some further deep dive into why we chose CHEF over other configuration management options at the time and walk you through the key considerations and use cases in the below to posts.

Cooking up some Veeam deployment with CHEF automation – Part 1

Cooking up some Veeam deployment with CHEF automation – Part 2

Always be updating

Veeam Backup & Replication at the beginning of 2020 released v10 of the product which packed many new features and functionality. This was a major release and more about what this entailed can be found here. Prior to this release Veeam Backup & Replication worked through several releases through the 9.5 release code with update 1 through to 4 before going to v10.

The first release of the cookbook was at the beginning of 2018 covering the GA release of Veeam Backup & Replication with the ability of deploying version 9.0 through to today the latest available release which is 10a which we will touch on shortly. You will see the efforts from start to the current build throughout the release notes

The baseline requirements of this cookbook are the following:

  • Installs Veeam Backup and Replication Server with an optional Catalog and Console plug-in plus all the Explorers. In our testing, the entire solution deploys in under 15mins including provisioning the host.
  • Allows you to quickly evaluate Veeam Backup and Replication Server or install using your own license file.
  • Get started backing up your VMware or Hyper-V environments in minutes with an industry leading backup solution.
  • Customize the Veeam cookbook by creating your own wrapper cookbook and referring to the included custom_resources for Chef 12.5+ environments.
  • Deploy to Windows 2012R2 or Windows 2016

Version support

This has fundamentally stayed the same throughout the versions of the cookbook whilst updating the capability of being able to use the latest version of Veeam Backup & Replication for fresh installations and deployments but also the upgrade process between the different versions.

You will see the timeline below in the next section that highlights the Veeam Backup & Replication versions that are supported with the cookbook versions.

Latest Release

The most recent release of the cookbook which was released 17/08/2020 brings the ability to install the latest Veeam Backup & Replication v10 and v10a release. The cookbook version was updated today and as if I was sitting by and waiting for the release, I saw the notification come through. The new cookbook can be found here.

081720 1344 Anupdatetot1

There has been a timeline of version support and releases since the start of this community project, there have also been several contributions from other community members.

081720 1344 Anupdatetot2

You will also notice that the latest release of Veeam Backup & Replication 10a is also included here and has been tested with the cookbook. You can find out more regarding the 10a release and although it seems like a minor update there are some significant features in there worth looking at here.

If you have any questions then please reach out and if you would like to contribute to the development of this cookbook then you can find the source code here. Another big thank you to Jeremy for his contributions on this.

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