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This post will highlight the capabilities of the Veeam CHEF cookbook and walkthrough getting things going. The first deployment mode is “Simple” this is a single Windows machine that will act as the all in one server, this server will contain all the mandatory components required for Veeam Backup & Replication to function. Next, we have the Advanced Deployment; this breaks up those components and allows us to deploy multiple nodes for different Veeam functions. Orange Lines are request and send cookbooks to and from CHEF Server. Black lines are initiating the bootstrap process for each node / component to be deployed. In advanced deployments,Read More →

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As part of my #SummerProject of exploring deeper into Infrastructure as Code, Public Cloud and Cloud Native it led me back to a session that I delivered last year at VeeamON. The concept of the session was to highlight some of the things we had done from a community point of view with CHEF and Veeam to really show Day 0 operations and getting Veeam up and running in a declarative fashion. Why did we choose to automate Veeam deployments? We wanted to come up with way to consistently deploy Veeam servers. When you look at the difference between simple deployments and more advanced environments,Read More →

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Do you use GitHub? How do you ensure if GitHub was down for a reason that your developers could still gain access to their code but also how many people actually run their code from GitHub directly into their environment? Why do you need to backup GitHub? As mentioned above if something was to happen to access to GitHub and that doesn’t just mean a site failure from that end it could also mean internet connectivity or issues within your environment which stops the ability to gain access to GitHub. What if one of your developers or GitHub administrators brings down an important repository orRead More →

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Terraform As I said above, I wanted to get into some of the examples of actually some of the tools used to provision your infrastructure using code, terraform use the terms “Execution Plans” to describe the way your code is deployed. Terraform was created by a company called Hashicop they have a number of really good tools in this space. The biggest pull factor for me and why I wanted to kick things off with Terraform is because Terraform is cloud agnostic or pretty much any infrastructure agnostic as you can use Terraform with you on premises vSphere environment as well as AWS, Azure andRead More →

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From my first post I wasn’t sure what to expect when diving head first into this newish world of Infrastructure As Code and what it would look like specifically in another world I wasn’t too sure about which is Cloud Computing. I felt that although I believe in the first post, I have grasped the reasons behind and the benefits for Infrastructure As Code I think we need to take a look how things were traditionally managed and still are for the most part in on premises datacentre. But also highlight some of the reasons why things are changing. How was infrastructure traditionally managed TheRead More →

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In the last post I said I was going to be kicking off my summer project and this year it was going to be around being more aware of cloud computing, by no means am I going to be knowing everything in the 3 weeks I have set aside but I want to be in a better place than I was at the beginning of summer and understand enough to have a good solid conversation with our customers but also the IT Community. First Steps I also mentioned in the first post about some of the resources I was going to get into but thisRead More →

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Every year the summer months in the UK and all over I guess are a good time to start not only reflecting but also thinking about things, last year we worked on some pretty interesting Infrastructure as code as part of a project that saw a lot of good content come out around deploying Veeam components using Terraform and CHEF, this actually made up the majority of our VMworld session and a few other events thereafter. This summer I felt it was now around the right time to use these slowly dwindling 3 weeks of summer before we head to VMworld to really focus inRead More →

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I wanted to follow on from my introduction and how to post regarding Chocolatey as a windows package manager and introduce a package that was authored by the community, I want to give a personal shout out to the authors of this package. Ericjaystevens – https://chocolatey.org/profiles/ericjaystevens Sbaerlocher – https://chocolatey.org/profiles/sbaerlocher Simon can also be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/sbaerlocher Veeam Agent for Windows The Veeam agent for Windows package provides the free version of the product which can be upgraded with the appropriate license key. But what this allows for is the streamlined approach of installing the Veeam Agent for Windows to provide a level ofRead More →

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One thing I have been meaning to write for a while now is around what I use to build out my templates from a software point of view, this could be the windows workstation or my windows server templates. From a Mac-OS perspective I use HomeBrew but I wanted to focus this on the windows side of things because there is not a great deal of options when it comes to Windows Packet Management. My go to has been Chocolatey. For those in the Linux world you can skip this one from the opening introduction, you guys have had yum for a while… The firstRead More →