vcenter event broker appliance

New VEBA release, new website and new mascot!

05/12/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Today I am very happy to share a number of updates with the community regarding the popular VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling. Each release has always been a team effort, but but I am especially proud of this release as it demonstrates how large the team has grown in the past 6 months and their impactful contributions to this solution to help our VMware customers and partners. Michael and I could not be more prouder and the feedback both internally and externally has been nothing but amazing and we are just getting started when it comes to event-driven automation for the SDDC!

New VEBA Release

Here are some of the key features in our latest v0.4 release. If you wish to see a detailed change log, please refer to the VEBA github releases page.

New VEBA Direct Console UI (DCUI)
New Incident Management example functions
New Golang example function
Deploy VEBA to a existing Kubernetes Cluster (documentation)
Updated VEBA base OS to latest Photon OS 3.0 Rev2
Replace Weave with Antrea CNI
Support customization of Docker bridge network (default: 172.17.0.1/16) via OVF property
Monitor VEBA Appliance using vRealize Operations (documentation)

Below are two features that I think is worth highlighting:

Thanks to Frankie Gold, we now have a slick new VEBA DCUI which replaces the old static /etc/issue entry which was only updated once after a successful deployment. If you decided to change the hostname, these changes would not be reflected. The new VEBA DCUI is dynamic and will display the latest configuration from the system including the configured system resources. In addition, it also uses the new /etc/veba-release file found within VEBA appliance which provides information about the version of VEBA, commit ID along with the event processor that was configured.

As part of the DCUI development planning, I was reminded of this fun little VMware Easter Egg. I thought it would be fun to include a few of our own and also give a nod back to this old school easter egg which sadly is no longer in the product. The default color scheme is green (cyan) and if you go into the VM Console and type "veba", you will activate an alternate color scheme as shown in the screenshot below. To return to the original color scheme, just type "veba" again to deactivate.

There is actually a couple more interesting 🐣easter eggs which I had asked Frankie to include ... I wonder who will be the first to find and share them? Maybe the first few folks who share details about the easter egg on it Twitter will get one of the new VEBA sticker!

UPDATE (05/13/20) - Congrats to Allan Kjaer on finding the first VEBA DCUI Easter Egg #1 which is typing the word "pride" (this is a nod back to the original easter egg found in Fusion, see reference above)

Congrats to @Allan_Kjaer on finding the first hidden 🐣#EasterEgg in latest #VEBA release. Type “pride” to activate/deactivate new color scheme

Very impressive Allan, as I thought this would have taken longer & was a nice nod to original @VMwareFusion Easter Egg 😊 pic.twitter.com/d06skOglj5

— William Lam (@lamw) May 13, 2020

Congrats David Bibby on finding the second and final VEBA DCUI Easter Egg #2 which is typing the word "otto" (name of VEBA's mascot) which will activate VEBA DCUI console with rendering of Otto 🙂 To deactivate and return to the default screen, simply type "otto" again.

Congrats @bib_ds on finding the last and final #VEBA #EasterEgg which is dedicated to our new mascot #OttoTheOrca

I’m sure colleagues will take a second look when they see 🐳 in the VM Summary page 😉 https://t.co/JaDUFkQ7fi

— William Lam (@lamw) May 13, 2020

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

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.

vCenter Event Broker Appliance Updates – VMworld, Fling, Community & Open Source

11/21/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

VMworld

At VMworld Barcelona, Michael Gasch and I had the privilege of presenting our #CODE1379E "If This Then That" for vSphere - The Power of Event Driven Automation session. The room was completely packed for a 9am session on Thursday after the big VMworld Party and we just wanted to thank everyone who attended the session and for those that came up to talk to us afterwards. We really had no idea how the session would be received but from the feedback, tweets and DM's we have received and continue to receive, it looks like the session really resonated with customers. In case you missed the session or could not attend VMworld, the session was recorded and is actually available for everyone to view. You just need to sign in with a free VMworld account.

VMware Fling

For those who attended the VMworld session in person, there was a nice surprise at the very end, which I think may be a VMworld first. Michael and I have been working on a side project in our spare time called the vCenter Event Broker Appliance or VEBA for short. This solution enables customers to easily create Event Driven Automation based on vCenter Server Events and rather than just showing off some cool demos, we wanted to leave the audience with something they can actually use right now!

With a little chant that was started by Emad Younis (this was NOT planned), the audience had spoken and wanted us to publish the planned VMware Fling which we were going to release in the coming days since we had just finished the process literally the week of VMworld. I figure its VMworld, this is what customers, partners and colleagues come here for and with a click of a button and crossing my fingers, the vCenter Event Broker Appliance Fling went LIVE.