Tunneling a vSphere Client connection over SSH
Mar 22, 2010 Blogs
My website is running on a single ESX machine in a remote datacenter somewhere. Because I am hosting the machine myself, I had to do my own routing and firewalling. I solved it by installing a pfSense virtual machine, hooking it up to both an internal and external vSwitch:
This way, my server is secure: both the Service Console as well as the virtual web server are only accessible through the firewall. I’m running OpenVPN on the pfSense machine, so if I need access to the internal subnet, I fire up OpenVPN. Sometimes, however, I don’t have the OpenVPN software running on the PC I’m working on, so I cannot access the Service Console and/or the web server.
A cool little solution for this is to use SSH tunneling. I connect to a third machine which is accessible through the Internet (runs a SSH daemon) and is able to connect to 10.10.100.2, the Service Console IP address. By configuring PuTTY to do some magic for us, I am able to connect my vSphere Client to my ESX server securely, without publishing my ESX-host to the world.
Veeam announces SureBackup
Mar 22, 2010 Blogs
Today, Veeam announced SureBackup. It’s an automated framework to do verification of your backups. It ensures reliability of the backup. It enhances the granularity of restoration.
How does it work?
The way Veeam does backups does not change with this introduction. Veeam still does image-level backups of complete Virtual Machines. This is flexible because it is Guest OS and application agnostic, portable and really simple, because it does not use any application integration using agents. This, of course, is also a major downer: it doesn’t integrate well with rare or home-grown apps. Neither does it backup data twice (once for image-level, once for agent based backups).
