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
Thanks to Partheeban Kandasamy (PK), we now have new function examples supporting some of the most popular incident management platforms such PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Jira, Jira Service Desk and ZenDesk. PK also wrote a nice blog post which goes into more detail on how to connect to your favorite incident management systems based on a specific vCenter Server event. I know PK also has another example showing how to integrate with Salesforce.com, so hopefully he will get that out soon as well.
New VEBA Website and Docs
Thanks to hard work from both Partheeban Kandasamy (PK) and Patrick Kremer, we not only have a brand new website (https://vmweventbroker.io/) for VEBA but all the documentation has been refreshed to include all the awesome work from the team including getting started guides, use cases, function examples and advanced topics related to VEBA.
There is even a proper "night mode" which is a must these days right and special animation on the right hand side? 😉
New VEBA Mascot
Last but not least, thanks to Robert Guske, we now have an official mascot for VEBA named Otto the Orca. Robert came up with the entire concept and funny background story, it was motivated by an old cartoon tv show he remembered called Street Sharks (which I had watched as a kid). A shark was a bit too aggressive for a solution like VEBA and he thought an Orca would be the right balance, not only a friend to all but can hold his own weight if needed 🙂
You can download Otto in various resolutions and he definitely makes for an awesome laptop sticker!
Look what just arrived from my buddy @vmw_rguske 😁 #OttoTheOrca #VEBA pic.twitter.com/EVq7y8DERa
— William Lam (@lamw) May 3, 2020
Thanks for the comment!