Cooking up some Veeam and Chef
A few months ago, I received a request to help out on a project to create a cookbook for Veeam Software specifically their Backup and Replication platform for Virtualized environments. Always up for a challenge, I started working on the project around the beginning of the year and was able to create a working model. Other projects and deliverables ate into my free cycles and sadly I never finished the cookbook. I am happy to announce that today we launched our second cookbook into the Chef Supermarket – Veeam. This is huge and I am very excited to finally get the project out of the shadows and available for general use.
When I took on this project, I will admit that I had heard of Veeam but had never even seen the software. I am happy to say that it wasn’t as daunting a task as I imagined. Fortunately, I had the help of a couple of fellow NetApp A-Teamers. Michael Cade , Veeam Global Technologist, and Jesse Anderson , Solutions Architect with AWS, not only helped me better understand the requirements but gave me invaluable insight. Together, we started working out the nuances of an automated build and came up with a solid game plan. The entire project took only a couple of weeks of free time to create the first cookbook and resources. I found that the software is easy to manage and the integration is very extensive. All-in-all the cookbook development was very straightforward. I am very happy with the output and excited to share this with you.
So what can this cookbook do for you?
- 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
