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Integrating VMware Cloud Notification Gateway with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

07/29/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

I previously wrote about the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) which provides curated notifications delivered to VMware Cloud on AWS users. By default, NGW supports several  types of notification channels such as email, VMware Cloud Console UI, VMware Cloud Activity Log, vRealize Log Intelligence Cloud (vRLIC) and the vSphere UI when using the vCenter Cloud Gateway. A lesser known feature of NGW is the ability to extend into even more channels by leveraging its webhook functionality which is available when using NGW API.

For a basic "pass through" of the NGW notification to another cloud service such as Slack or Microsoft Teams as example, you can simple setup an incoming webhook on Slack or Microsoft Teams, which I had covered in the previous blog post. From there, you can configure an NGW subscription and forward the NGW notification to the specified incoming webhook.

For more interesting scenarios where customers may want to perform some additional data processing when the NGW notification arrives or run some code/automation and integrate that with other systems which can include your on-premises infrastructure, the basic webhook workflow is not sufficient. Having said that, at the end of the previous blog post I did hint at a solution that would enable customers to support such scenarios which is by leveraging the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution.


The way this works is that we are still taking advantage of the NGW webhook capability but instead of forwarding the NGW notification to a cloud service that supports an incoming webhook, we are sending it to VEBA for processing. Once the notification has been received by VEBA, customers can apply additional logic by using any language of their choice which runs as an automated function and is then responsible for sending the final payload to its destination. This is really the power of VEBA which enables customers to perform any additional processing or business logic to an event before sending it out to its intended target.

[Read more...] about Integrating VMware Cloud Notification Gateway with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

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Filed Under: Automation, VMware Cloud on AWS Tagged With: Notification Gateway, vcenter event broker appliance, VMC, VMware Cloud on AWS

Custom notification and automation based on host failure in VMware Cloud on AWS

07/09/2020 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Physical hardware failure is inevitable, this is true whether it is running in your on-premises datacenter or in the Cloud like VMware Cloud on AWS. Although vSphere HA will automatically restart all affected VMs after detecting a host failure, there is usually additional activities that must be performed by a customer such as notifying all impacted application owners and even creating an incident ticket for hardware replacement.

With VMware Cloud on AWS, the hardware replacement is done automatically for you but the downstream activity of notifying application owners to verify the application is functional is still managed by the customer. There are many ways in how customers can manage such incidents and one solution that I am a huge advocate of is taking advantage of the powerful vCenter Server Events, which has over 1700+ events, not to mention any of the 2nd/3rd party events.

When an ESXi host fails, the com.vmware.vc.HA.DasHostFailedEvent event will be generated which contains all the relavent information related to the host failure including the specific hostname/IP, when the incident occurred and details about the vSphere Cluster and Datacenter is also provided. This information is visible using the vSphere UI but it can also be programmatically retrieved using the vSphere API, which is how the vSphere UI renders this information.

Note: Everything described in this blog post including the VEBA example is applicable to any environment that contains vCenter Server and is not limited to just VMware Cloud on AWS.

[Read more...] about Custom notification and automation based on host failure in VMware Cloud on AWS

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Filed Under: Automation, VMware Cloud on AWS Tagged With: vcenter event broker appliance, VEBA, VMC, VMware Cloud on AWS

ESX 3.x on VMware Cloud on AWS? 

10/10/2019 by William Lam 2 Comments

VMworld Barcelona is just around the corner and this week I started working on building out the different demo environments which will all be running on VMware Cloud on AWS. In one of the demos, I need to have ESX 3.0 running, yes you read that correctly! ESX as in the original version with the Service Console (cos), some of you maybe too young to remember these good ol days? 😉

First, Let me be clear, there really is no good reason for this except for the nostalgia purposes and for what I am trying to demonstrate in our VMworld session. If you are curious about the demo and attend VMworld, be sure to sign up for HBI1967BE Workload Migration Techniques for On-Premises and Cloud Infrastructures which I will be co-presenting with Emad Younis. Secondly, Nested Virtualization whether it is the latest version of ESXi or our very first release, is not officially supported.

[Read more...] about ESX 3.x on VMware Cloud on AWS? 

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Filed Under: ESXi, Nested Virtualization, Not Supported, VMware Cloud on AWS Tagged With: esx 3.0, Nested ESXi, nested virtualization, VMC, VMware Cloud on AWS

Configuring Standalone vRealize Orchestrator with VMware Cloud on AWS

07/11/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) is powerful workflow engine that many of our customers have been using to automate across a number of different VMware and 3rd party solutions. It is also a foundational component to vRealize Automation (vRA) and it enables our customers to build end-to-end IT and Developer workflows across different Clouds: Private, Public and Hybrid.

It should come as no surprise that existing vRO/vRA customers would like to take advantage of VMware Cloud on AWS and be able to add its vCenter Server instance to vRO for Automation purposes. A few weeks back, I had heard mixed results from our field and customers when attempting to add VMware Cloud on AWS vCenter Server endpoint to vRO. I was actually working with another customer on a related topic and I decided I give this a try in my lab, which was running the standalone vRO 7.5 Appliance.

I did indeed run into a problem when attempting to add vCenter Server as an endpoint in vRO. It turns out this was due to a bug with the vSphere vRO Plugin which has since been resolved with the latest vRO 7.6 release. In any case, there is a simple workaround for customers that are currently not running the latest vRO appliance and you can find the instructions below.

[Read more...] about Configuring Standalone vRealize Orchestrator with VMware Cloud on AWS

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Filed Under: Automation, VMware Cloud on AWS, vRealize Suite Tagged With: orchestrator, vcenter orchestrator, VMC, VMware Cloud on AWS, vrealize orchestrator

Automating HCX Multi-Site Service Mesh configuration using the new HCX PowerCLI cmdlets

07/01/2019 by William Lam 2 Comments

With the latest Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) R121 release, the new HCX Multi-Site Service Mesh configuration option is now the default and preferred method for setting up HCX. In fact, the legacy "HCX Components" method, which is focused on deploying individual HCX Appliances has been deprecated in the latest release and will be removed in the future, in favor of the new simplified deployment option.


As many of you know, I have been doing quite a bit of HCX Automation with VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) and with the recent PowerCLI 11.3 release which now includes new HCX Multi-Site Service Mesh (MSSM) cmdlets, I figured this would be a good time to update my automation to take advantage of the new HCX MSSM feature.

While trying out the new MSSM cmdlets, I ran into a couple of issues which took me awhile to figure out. The issue stems from the fact that you can not simply create some of the MSSM objects such as a Network or Compute Profile and then save the output to a variable for use with other CSSM cmdlets, which I found to be quite strange as that is one of the biggest benefit of PowerShell and being able to pipe objects between cmdlets. You have to perform a "GET" operation on the object that you had just created because the types returned are different between the New and Get cmdlets. In any case, here is a sample end-to-end workflow using the new MSSM cmdlets as I figured others may run into this problem scratching their head and the PowerCLI documentation was not very clear about this behavior, at least it was not apparent to me.

[Read more...] about Automating HCX Multi-Site Service Mesh configuration using the new HCX PowerCLI cmdlets

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Filed Under: Automation, HCX, PowerCLI, VMware Cloud on AWS Tagged With: HCX, HCX Multi-Site Service Mesh, Hybrid Cloud Extension, PowerCLI, PowerCLICore, VMC, VMware Cloud on AWS

Automating HCX Add On for VMware Cloud on AWS

06/19/2019 by William Lam 1 Comment

Enabling Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) for a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC is just a click of a button and is completely self-service which makes consuming the HCX Service extremely easy! All the hard work of deploying and configuring the required HCX infrastructure for your SDDC is completely automated for you by VMware when you click on "Deploy HCX" button.


Once the HCX infrastructure has been deployed in your SDDC, you can then deploy the respective HCX components for your on-premises vSphere environment which you can fully automate end-to-end which I have blogged about here.

Although the deployment of the HCX components for the SDDC is just click of a button, I recently had a need to automate this and I figure this would be a nice addition to my HCX PowerShell Community Module and complete the end-to-end story quite nicely from enabling the HCX Cloud Service to automating the deployment and configuration of the on-premises HCX components.

[Read more...] about Automating HCX Add On for VMware Cloud on AWS

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Filed Under: Automation, HCX, PowerCLI, VMware Cloud on AWS Tagged With: HCX, Hybrid Cloud Extension, VMC, VMware Cloud on AWS

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Services Business Unit (CSBU) at VMware. He focuses on Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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