We have been back in the kitchen and cooking up some new Veeam integrations.

Since the VeeamON event back in May, I have planned to put together a few sample Terraform templates.  The conference went great and our session was very well received.  The subject involved how we came up with the Chef Cookbook for Veeam and demonstrations on how the solution works.  In light of this coming week’s VMworld and the fact that my good friend Michael Cade from Veeam (https://vzilla.co.uk/) will be presenting using this solution.  I wanted to post some updates and new enhancements.  I am also including a brand new Terraform repository with ready-to-go templates to deploy Veeam Backup & Replication into vSphere.

Updates included in Version 2.1.1 of the cookbook:

• Direct Download links and helpers for VBR Update 3a.  Another exciting piece of news is that we were able to test the new Veeam Backup & Replication Update 3a using the Chef cookbook.  The upgrade process worked perfectly with no additional changes required.  This means that the cookbook has Zero-Day support for the upgrade.  Simply change your installation_package_url attribute or the build version attribute to use (9.5.0.1922) and the next chef-client run will do the upgrade.
• We introduced a new Recipe::HostMgmt.  This recipe allows for even easier configuration of a server to register to Veeam Backup & Replication.  This feature is now leveraged as part of the example Terraform templates to automatically register the vSphere server to the Veeam Backup & Replication console.

New Features available in the Example Terraform Templates:

• Deploy with or without a Chef Server.  We added two template models to allow environments without a Chef Server to leverage this solution.
• Deploy Veeam Backup & Replication with Proxies.  Terraform Templates included will automatically build VBR from the ground up and upgrade to the desired version which is now default configured to install Update 3a.  After the VBR server is online and registers your vCenter server, any number of proxies can be dynamically built.
• Standalone Veeam Proxy deployment templates.  Already have a Veeam Backup & Replication server?  No worries, take advantage of our dynamic proxy templates to scale UP and DOWN any number of proxies that you need.  These templates can also be called as part of your backup job pre and post scripts.
• Instructions for creating rapid, managed Veeam Proxy templates.  Included in the Readme for the Veeam Proxy templates are the steps to create a managed Proxy template using Chef.  This cuts down a large portion of the time that it takes to spin up new proxies.  The nice part is that you can consistently manage new releases by leveraging Chef and the Veeam cookbook.  No more snowflake configurations.

Example Terraform Templates for Veeam – https://github.com/exospheredata/veeam_terraform

Version 2.1.1 release of Chef Cookbook for Veeam – https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/veeam