Virtualization

Another article that focuses on NIC Teaming and Link Aggregation. When we consolidate multiple servers onto a single physical HW (because the performance of the CPU, memory and other components is quite sufficient), it is very useful to increase the security and throughput of the network connection by connecting through multiple network interfaces. I consider VMware ESX to be the best visualization platform today, where the ESXi version is even free, so I'm committed to it.

A description of the basic operations to enable a connection from a VMware ESXi Server (iSCSI Initiator) to an iSCSI Target over a SAN. That is, connecting to a disk array and disk mapping (LUN), including setting up Multipath, and creating a datastore. The description is for VMware vSphere version 6.5, but is similar on other versions.

If we rent a virtual data center (vDC) based on VMware technology, it will likely be managed using VMware vCloud Director. This article briefly (in the end I elaborated a bit more) describes the basic operations in vCloud Director version 8.20.

Veeam ONE is a solution for monitoring and analyzing the Veeam Backup & Replication backup solution, but also the entire virtual infrastructure on the VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V platform. We will describe basic installation and configuration, connection to Veeam Backup & Replication Server, VMware vCenter Server and System Center Virtual Machine Manager Server. Installation is simple and not much configuration is required to make the product work. But some things are good to know.

The Veeam ONE solution uses a rich client that enables monitoring of backup and virtual infrastructure. And a web client that provides dashboards and reports. In this article, we'll look at the basic usage and features of the rich Veeam ONE Client for infrastructure monitoring and management. An important part of the solution are alarms that alert you to events, changes and problems.

A brief description of the in-place upgrade of Veeam ONE 12 to version 12.2. The whole process is simple and hassle-free. It should work similarly for other versions as well.

Practical description of in-place upgrade from Veeam ONE 12.3.0.4670 to version 13.0.1.5924. Veeam ONE 13 supports Veeam Backup & Replication 12 and newer. The entire process is simple and trouble-free. It proceeds similarly to a minor upgrade within version 12. At the end of the article, I added brief information about installing Veeam ONE 13.0.1 Patch 1 (13.0.1.6168), i.e. the Veeam ONE update.

Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that allows you to define, deploy, and manage infrastructure in a declarative manner using configuration files. We can use it to create, for example, vApps, VMs, and networks. We will describe the basics of using Terraform, specifically focusing on working with VMware Cloud Director (VCD) cloud infrastructure. We will use the official Terraform Provider for VMware Cloud Director.

Following the introductory overview of Terraform and the VMware Cloud Director provider, we will now look at the Guest OS Customization feature. It enables automated OS configuration of a newly deployed virtual machine. We will focus on the ability to run a custom script as part of the customization. The script can contain variables defined in Terraform, which are dynamically substituted during VM creation. The result is an automated and parameterized VM deployment from a template.

If we want to use Terraform to manage virtual infrastructure, in practice we may have dozens, hundreds, or even more resources of the same type. Typically these are virtual machines (VMs). We want their configuration (description) to be clear and well-scalable. In this article, we will look at some basic options. We will use variables, the map and object data types, and the for_each meta-argument within a resource.

The principle of Terraform is that it creates (or destroys) defined objects. It stores information in a state file (State) and uses it to detect the difference between the current and desired state. Resources created this way can be modified or destroyed by changing the configuration. If we want to use Terraform to modify resources that were created in a different way, we must import them into Terraform. This is not entirely straightforward. In the example, we will import all VMs from a specific vApp.

One day, the Veeam ONE Reporting Service stopped starting without any warning. As a result, most Veeam ONE features stopped working. The cause turned out to be straightforward, a self-signed certificate for the Web API had disappeared from the system certificate store. How this happened could not be determined, but the fix was quick and simple.