HashiConf took place a couple of weeks ago now, and during the event I presented a community based Lightning Talk live. The session is based on using Infrastructure as Code tooling to enhance mundane deployments and in the talk, I talk through how mundane approaches are still being used by lots of people and why that is fundamentally okay… however there are opportunities to change that behaviour and enhance repeatable, mundane tasks.

Automation is all about problem solving… taking a mundane manual task and making it easier to execute consistently and having that process be repeatable. From there we can leverage it to help solve other issues such as scaling or more inventive ways of going about things. This was the essence for this project, to use Infrastructure as Code to deploy and configure Veeam Components and specifically in this case apply it to one of the areas where repeatable, automated deployments can help with deploy and scale for Veeam customers and partners… that is the Backup Proxy.

I use a terraform deployment example that takes a mundane Veeam deployment, and make a little bit more dynamic resulting in a dynamic deployment a project that on Github and am then able to apply it to use cases that didn’t exist before. The session was recorded and we are able to share it ourselves through our own distribution platforms… it can be viewed below

• Intro: (0:00) Agenda: (0:41)
• The mundane approach: (1:18)
• Automating Scalability for Veeam Proxies: (3:55)
• IaC with Terraform and more: (4:50)
• Project Otosukeru: (5:15)
• Calling Terraform from PowerShell: (6:30)
• Using PowerShell to configure Veeam Proxies: (10:05)
• Deploy, scale up or down with Terraform and PowerShell: (11:45)
• Wrap up and Links to Resources: (15:24)

Project Ōtosukēru (Blog Post)

The initial aim of this project was to have Veeam Proxies automatically deployed and configured for ephemeral use by Veeam Backup & Replication jobs. It has the ability to deploy Veeam Backup Proxy VMs to vSphere and configures them in Veeam Backup & Replication and also the ability to remove the configuration and destroy the VMs. A pre and post script can be configured within the Veeam Job and run every-time the job is executed. As the scope of the project grew, the focus shifted to the ability to deploy Veeam Proxies automatically, but then have the ability to scale the number up or down dynamically. It also has the ability to deploy and scale new NAS File Proxies.