Blog

February 25, 2019
in Tutorial
14 min read

How to Automate OpenVPN Server Deployment and User Management

Recently I’ve been tasked to come up with a VPN solution which must support: - All major desktop and mobile OSes as clients - Clients behind NAT - Mikrotik RouterOS as a client - Site-to-site and remote access VPNs

First, I had to decide whether it will be a dedicated hardware appliance or software running on a VM. The latter was more appealing because of its flexibility and ease of deployment.

Second, I needed to choose the actual software. The following options were considered: - IPSEC implementations such as FreeSWAN, OpenSWAN or strongSWAN - OpenVPN - SoftEther

OpenVPN was chosen because of its huge user base, cross-platform client support, and extensive customization options.

February 19, 2019
in Tutorial
6 min read

Automate Windows VM Creation and Configuration in vSphere Using Packer, Terraform and Ansible (Part 3 of 3)

This is the final entry in the series. In this post, I want to show how Ansible can be used to automate Windows VM provisioning. As always all the scripts and configurations are available at my GitHub repository.

January 21, 2019
in Tutorial
17 min read

Automate Windows VM Creation and Configuration in vSphere Using Packer, Terraform and Ansible (Part 2 of 3)

In the first entry of this series I showed how to create VM templates using Packer. Now we can use those templates to spin up actual VMs with help of Terraform.

December 20, 2018
in Tutorial
7 min read

Automate Windows VM Creation and Configuration in vSphere Using Packer, Terraform and Ansible (Part 1 of 3)

In this series of posts I'd like to show how to automate the process of setting up virtual infrastructure consisting of several Windows Server 2016 machines. Most articles I've come across cover the use of cloud providers (e.g. AWS) as a virtualization platform, so I decided to make a write up about my experience with VMware vSphere.