Powershell as glue for System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and VEEAM Backup & Replication

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IT infrastructures and services management was and still is today an important part of my ‘business as usual‘ set of activities. Regardless of the tools and technologies implemented what I look for are always two features for monitoring and automation, simplicity and efficiency.

If monitoring is essential for having visibility on the overall infrastructure and for being proactive, automation is necessary for delivering consistent results in a timely manner especially in complex scenarios.

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DevOps: VMs lifecycle management with Vagrant

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My ultimate goal as a DevOps engineer is providing solutions focusing on aligning IT systems to company’s culture and business processes.  Limiting the time spent on creating bespoke tools and scripts that not all sysops are able to understand or maintain properly.  Any custom tool is hard to maintain without a basic software engineering background and  it needs a proper design, documentation, QA and all diligence and discipline required along the way.

From imperative to declarative

To achieve this result I need to shift from a developer mindset where is imperative (creating flows) writing programs or automation scripts to declarative,  specifying just the desired state of a system in a YAML or JSON files that are a “lingua franca” between devs and sysops providing an up-to-date documentation that can be safely managed on a SCM (like GIT).

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