When running a home lab for vSphere, hardware is oftentimes not on the official VMware / Broadcom HCL. Creating custom images is therefore a must to get the required drivers for storage, networking and other hardware. I created a (very popular) script on GitHub for this a while back but it’s been years and changes have made it obsolete.
Recently I was pondering updating my scripts to align with all the recent changes but at the same time I came across a bunch of scripts by “itiligent” on GitHub. They worked so well that I switched to using them instead of the scripts I had created previously.
If you’re looking for a way to create custom ISO images for ESXi, do check it out:
For infrequent VPN connectivity between on-prem labs / data centers and AWS it doesn’t make sense to have a permanent VPN connection up 24/7. However, configuring the on-premises Mikrotik router each time is time consuming and error-prone when done manually.
Functionality
This Python script connects to AWS using boto3, reads the details for the first VPN connection it can find and then generates the commands required to set up:
Inside IP addresses for the VPN tunnel
IPsec proposal settings
IPset profile settings
IPsec peers
IPsec secrets
BGP peers
BGP networks to advertise
Firewall setting
etc.
After the commands are generated, simply copy and paste into a Mikrotik CLI window over SSH or similar and the connection will come up in a couple of minutes.
Prerequisites
This script only handles the on-prem side of the connectivity. It assumes the following is already in place at the AWS side:
VPC with subnets
CGW (Customer Gateway)
VGW (Virtual Private Gateway) which is attached to the VPC
The AWS side has been configured but IPSEC and BGP are both down
Running the script generates the commands required to connect the Mikrotik to AWS
Copy and paste the generated commands into the Mikrotik CLI
After a couple of minutes, IPSEC is up and routes are dynamically shared over BGP
More information
For more information, including how to set up the AWS VPN configuration and a more detailed explanation of the manual steps to configure the Mikrotik router, please refer to this blog post: https://jonamiki.com/2022/05/04/mikrotik-vpn-to-aws-vpc/
