vSphere

Integrating vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) with vRealize Orchestrator

03/19/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) is still used by many of our customers to automate various infrastructure tasks whether that is running it in standalone mode connected to a vCenter Server(s) or powering the extensibility of vRealize Automation. For customers who have already built an extensive collection of vRO workflows, it certainly makes sense that they would like to reuse the Automation they have already created.

For customers that want to easily subscribe to specific vCenter Server event(s) and trigger specific Automation workflows, the vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling has been a very popular solution. Customers no longer have to write or manage the code to retrieve specific event(s) from vCenter Server, instead they can focus on the really interesting part of the workflow which is automation or "business logic" that does something specific with a given vCenter Server event. Some common examples including notification using Slack or SMS, vSphere automation such as applying a vSphere Tag or hardening a VM configuration to alerting using PagerDuty to ticket creation in ServiceNow or Salesforce.com, the list goes on and on.

The great news is that vRO customers can also benefit from VEBA while leveraging their existing vRO workflows. VEBA can integrate with any vRO workflow by simply having a function, written using any language of your choice, that calls into the vRO's REST API to trigger a specific vRO workflow. To demonstrate this integration, I have built VEBA function using PowerShell which executes a vSphere Tagging vRO workflow which can be found here and below is a video on how this works.

Big updates to the vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling

03/10/2020 by William Lam 1 Comment

The vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) team has been working hard over the last couple of months on some pretty exciting enhancements and today we are pleased to announce the release of VEBA v0.3 which can be download from the VMware Fling site. Although this is a "dot" release, do not let that fool you as this release contains a large number updates including a major re-architecture in how events are consumed and processed at the core of VEBA.

While this re-architecture does introduce some breaking changes, it does unlock a number of new capabilities that our current users have been asking for. It also provides us with a solid foundation for delivering on future enhancements such as multi-vCenter Server support and additional event sources from NSX-T, vSAN and other VMware Cloud Services to just name a few. Today, the "V" in VEBA stands for vCenter, but in the future, I do see it changing to just "VMware" as it can support so many other solutions.

Having said that, some of the breaking changes also improves the overall user experience, especially as it relates to defining and consuming vCenter Server events as well as troubleshooting and debugging. The team is super excited to get this release in the hands of our community and we look forward to hearing your feedback!

What's New:

Introduction of the VMware Event Router which provides a modular and flexible architecture for decoupling the stream "Providers" such as vCenter Server from the actual stream "Processors" like OpenFaaS. More details including its architecture and design can be found here

How to automate the creation multiple routable VLANs on single L2 network using VyOS

02/12/2020 by William Lam 4 Comments

My personal homelab has a very simple network topology, everything is connected to a single flat network. This has served me well over the years, but sometimes it can prevent me from deploying more complex scenarios. Most recently while working with NSX-T and Project Pacific, I had a need for additional VLANs which my home router does not support. There are a number of software solutions that can be used including the popular pfSense, which I have used before.

Over the Winter break, a colleague introduced me to VyOS, which is another popular software firewall and router solution. I had not heard of VyOS before but later realized it was derived from Vyatta, which I had heard of, but development of that solution had stopped and VyOS is now the open source version of that software. Having never played with VyoS before, I thought this might be a good learning opopournity and started to dabble with VyOS over the holiday. At a high level, I have VyOS connected to two networks: Outside network as VyOS refers which is your local LAN and Inside network as VyOS refers which is an is an isolated vSphere Portgroup (VSS/VDS) that is not connected to anything and configured to pass all traffic (4095). From here, you can create multiple VLANs in VyOS which can then be untagged using Virtual Guest Tagging (VGT) by placing a Nested ESXi VM on the same isolated portgroup and then creating the respective portgroups within the Nested ESXi VM mapping to the VyOS VLANs you have created.

One of the nice benefits of this solution is that you can create multiple "Isolated" yet routable networks that can still reach your primary LAN network and still have to access core infrastructure services running like Active Directory, DNS, etc. which was one of my requirements. After figuring out how VyOS works and applying that to my specific use case, I thought why not build some basic automation to setup this solution as I probably will forget how I setup everything. Initially I was using the VyOS OVA but later found out it was an extremely out of date there was no public version of the latest VyOS release in OVA form. I decided to use their latest rolling release and apply some vSphere API Automation to not only install VyOS but also fully configure based on template containing VyOS commands. I know the latest version of VyOS now includes a REST API but its a bit of a chicken/egg to enable and not very friendly to use compared to the solution I have built.

Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling v3.1

01/22/2020 by William Lam 1 Comment

Here is a small update to the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling which includes a couple of commonly requested features along with some bug fixes.

What's New in v3.1

Support for disk format conversion between Thick (Lazy Zeroed), Thick (Eager Zeroed) and Thin provisioning
Support for VM rename pattern for Clone operation
Fixed duplicated network selection when performing bulk migration
Fixed startup failure when a new home vCenter is specified as a command line argument

vSphere HTML5 and Standalone UI Client Support

In our 3.0 release, we added support for a native vSphere HTML5 (H5) Client experience which leverages new remote plugin framework that was introduced in vSphere 6.7 Update 1 and enables customers who prefer to use the H5 Client for their day to day use to also take advantage of the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Tool directly from the same UI. However, the addition of this new consumption UI created some confusion as some folks assumed this was the only mechanism. As stated in the release notes, we support both the new H5 UI as well as the standalone UI which many customers have been using for quite some time.

I suspect the confusion was due to the new CLI syntax which now requires specifying a vCenter Server endpoint to register. It is true that if you wish to use the new H5 Client integration, you will need to have a vSphere 6.7 Update 1 environment and provide credentials to that "home" vCenter Server. However, if you do not wish to use the H5 Client and you wish to use the old standalone client, you simply omit the vCenter Server registration details and the standalone client will work. In fact, even if you decide to use the H5 Client UI, you can always use the standalone client as that is the actual backend of the system.

Option 1: vSphere H5 Client Plugin

The following command will register the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling plugin to the specified vCenter Server:

java -jar xvm-3.1.jar --vcenter.fqdn=VCENTER-IP-OR-FQDN --vcenter.user=ADMIN-USER --vcenter.pass=ADMIN-PASSWORD

You will need to logout and then log back in to see the plugin which is located under "Menu" as shown in the screenshot below.

Option 2: Standalone UI Client

The following command will start the Cross vCenter Workload Migration Fling in standalone mode:

java -jar xvm-3.1.jar

You can then access the standalone client by opening a browser to localhost and port specified (default is 8443). You can always access the plugin locally whether you are using Option 1 or 2.

Forwarding vCenter Events into AWS EventBridge using vCenter Event Broker Appliance

01/14/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

After attending Mike Deck's AWS reInvent session last year on Building event-driven architectures faster than ever with Amazon EventBridge, I could not help but draw a number of parallel concepts between AWS EventBridge and our recently released vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling. I thought it was a very interesting solution and certainly wanted to give it a try as I think it could really benefit some of our customers, especially for those already using our VMware Cloud on AWS solution and being able to take advantage of the various AWS Services in an event-driven fashion.

In fact, one of the use cases that I had in mind was one that we had from a VMware Cloud on AWS customer who wanted to take a vCenter Event and forward that off to AWS CloudWatch. The solution that I had shared last year was utilizing our vRealize Log Insight Cloud solution which is integrated into VMware Cloud on AWS and leveraging its webhook functionality to call into a AWS Lambda function which would then process the payload directly into CloudWatch. Although this solution works and I know several customers who have implemented something similiar, I think EventBridge could certainly provide a more flexible way to integrate not only with CloudWatch but almost any AWS Service or 3rd party service.

Intel NUC 9 Pro & Extreme – First “Modular” NUC

01/07/2020 by William Lam 21 Comments

The highly anticipated "modular" Next Unit of Computing (NUC) has just been announced at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week, dubbed the Intel NUC 9 Pro (codename Quartz Canyon) and NUC 9 Extreme (codename Ghost Canyon). Boy am I super excited for this new platform and what it could mean for the VMware Community! 😍

Immediately off the bat, you can see that this is not your typical NUC "cube" form factor. Intel has completely redesigned the system from the inside and out, more on this in a bit. The key difference between the two NUC 9 variants (Pro and Extreme) are the CPU options, which are detailed below. For the remainder of this article, I will be focusing on the Pro version of the NUC 9 and I will call out any differences where applicable.

The use of the word "Pro" is also quite fitting as Intel is positioning this system as a high-end prosumer to Mid-Enterprise device compared to the traditional NUC. The NUC 9 Pro is targeting more demanding workloads such as Digital Content Creation, CAD/Manufacturing and Financial Service applications that either require a high-end graphics card or AI module for computing. When I first heard about this system from Intel, it conceptually reminded me of Apple's recent 2019 Mac Pro, which is also designed with modularity in mind and can cater to a variety of use cases.

Speaking of use cases, although Virtualization is not a target use case for this new platform, VMware customers have been taking advantage of the Intel NUCs for a number of years now and it is still by far the most popular platform for running a vSphere/vSAN/NSX Home Lab. However, one common complaint I often hear about the current generations of NUCs has been its CPU and I think the new NUC 9 Pro/Extreme will be a nice contender for current alternatives like the popular Supermicro E200-8D. Thanks to Intel, I was able to get my hands on a pre-production NUC 9 Pro unit for testing, so lets take a closer look at what this new platform has to offer!