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VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) v0.7.1

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The VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) team is excited to share that we have just delivered our final VEBA release for 2021, VEBA v0.7.1, which is a minor update that contains a couple of fixes that was observed in the original v0.7 release. With the recent log4j vulnerability disclosure, I also want to mention that VEBA is NOT affected.

As 2021 starts to wrap up, I also wanted to take this opportunity and thank everyone in our VEBA community for your continued support and engagement. Our public VEBA Slack channel has more than doubled in size since launching and we just had our 250th user join this week! We also recently launched our VEBA Monthly Community Call, where folks can bring questions and use cases to discuss with others on how best to achieve certain outcomes. All sessions are recorded including meeting notes, which you can review in case you can not make. The community call occurs on the last Tuesday of each month at 8am PST (we will not be doing Dec call due to upcoming holidays).

Lastly, I could not be more excited for VEBA in 2022 and hopefully we will be able to share more news in the upcoming year. If you still have not heard of VEBA before and wish to learn more, I highly encourage you check out our VMworld 2021 session VEBA Revolutions - Unleashing the Power of Event-Driven Automation #CODE2773 and start on your Event-Driven Automation journey with our community.

Have a happy and safe holiday everyone! ☃️🥳🍾

What's New

Note: If you currently have vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3 installed, you may run into an issue when using the VEBA vSphere UI plugin. This is currently a known issue which will be fixed in a future vCenter Server update, however you can follow this blog post for a workaround.

New VEBA Logo

Last but not least, we also want to share that the VEBA project now has an official VMware logo! A big thanks to the VMware Brand team who helped create our logo in such a short amount of time, it turned out amazing and conceptualizes VEBA in such a simple, yet powerful graphic 👌


We certainly will miss the Otto the Orca as the "unofficial" VEBA logo that was designed and created by fellow VEBA teammate Robert Guske.

Quick Tip - Access the RabbitMQ management UI when using the Kubernetes operator

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I was recently working with the RabbitMQ Cluster Kubernetes Operator, which provides an easy way to deploy and manage RabbitMQ clusters using Kubernetes (k8s). In fact, the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution also makes use of RabbitMQ operator as part of its backend infrastructure.

While troubleshooting my RabbitMQ deployment yesterday, I came to learn about a really useful tip in accessing the RabbitMQ management console UI which provides a number of useful pieces of information including resource utilization. Once logged in, we quickly found the issue which was due to memory pressure and once that was resolved, everything was working as expected.


I was not aware that RabbitMQ had this useful dashboard and that you could easily access it once you knew how to retrieve the credentials.

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How to create a kubernetes service account for vSphere with Tanzu?

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Before you can interact and consume resources from a vSphere with Tanzu enabled cluster, users must first login and one way to accomplish this is by using the kubectl-vsphere plugin.

Once authenticated, a JWT (JSON Web Token), pronounced jot token, will be issued along with other values which will be appended to your local ~/.kube/config file. Users will then be able to perform kubectl operations based on the roles they have been assigned for a given vSphere Namespace. In case you did not know, these JWT tokens are only valid for 10 hours and after that, you will need to login again to retrieve a new JWT token.

We can also confirm this by decoding our JWT token found within the ~/.kube/config file and using jwt.io website. Once decoded, we can see when the token was issued using iat (Issued At) and when the token will expired using exp (Expiration Time) as shown in the screenshot below.

The default 10 hour expiry is currently not configurable which can be a challenge for anyone looking to setup unattended automation or GitOps with vSphere with Tanzu.

An alternative solution is to create a Kubernetes (k8s) service account, which by default does not contain a token expiry. Using this information and my recent Deep Dive into vSphere Namespace Roles, I was able to create a service account that can perform the same set of vSphere with Tanzu operations without having to re-login every 10 hours.

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