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Extending VMware Cloud on AWS Notifications using the Notification Gateway API

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The VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) Service was launched back in May 2019 and is used to communicate important customer-facing notifications which can be delivered across a number of different communication channels as shown in the diagram below.


Of all the different communication channels, I think one of the most interesting one is the ability to send an outgoing webhook based on a specific VMware Cloud Event. In fact, this was the very first thing that caught my attention when I had first learned about the NGW Service from Nancy Cheng, the Product Manager for this service.

You can probably guess why I was so excited for this feature as it mimics a similiar capability to our VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution. This not only enables our customers to consume other public cloud services that support webhooks but it also opens up the door for more advanced integrations, more on this at the end of this blog post 😀

As of publishing this blog post, there are over 75+ VMware Cloud Events which customers can subscribe to such including when a new SDDC is created or deleted, a new ESXi host has been added either manually or automatically via our Elastic DRS (eDRS) Service, SDDC maintenance notices to subscription reminders to just name a few. Although the default email and UI channels are great, many customers would also like to receive these notifications using other popular communications channels such as Slack or Microsoft Teams.

To help demonstrate the webhook functionality of the NGW Service API, I have created a PowerShell Module for VMware Cloud Notifications called VMware.VMC.Notification which is also published i then Microsoft Powershell Gallery. The module contains the following functions:

  • Connect-VmcNotification
  • Get-VmcNotificationEvent
  • Get-VmcNotificationWebhook
  • Test-VmcNotificationWebhook
  • Remove-VmcNotificationWebhook

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Admin account for embedded Harbor registry in vSphere with Kubernetes

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After setting up a vSphere with Kubernetes Cluster, customers have the option of enabling a built-in private container registry that can be used with the Supervisor Cluster. This private container registry uses the popular Opensource Harbor solution which is also a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project.


Although this is a convenient capability, one thing to be aware of is that the embedded Harbor registry is limited in functionality compared to a standalone Harbor deployment and this is by design. When logging into Harbor with your vCenter SSO user, you will be able to do perform basic operations such as pushing and pulling images from this registry. For customers that require additional functionality from Harbor, it is recommended that you setup an external Harbor instance which can also be used as a common registry for both the Supervisor Cluster as well any Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Clusters that you may provision.

With that said, I have heard from a few folks who were interested in accessing the Harbor UI using the "admin" account, mostly from an exploration standpoint. The admin credentials for Harbor are dynamically generated each time the service is enabled and it is stored as a K8s secret within the Supervisor Cluster. This means the admin password is unique for each environment and the instructions below will show you how to obtain the credentials.

UPDATE (12/16/20) - I was informed by Engineering the ability to read K8s secrets was actually a bug and this has since been fixed in the latest release of vSphere with Tanzu. If you need the harbor credentials, you will need to directly login to the Supervisor Cluster from the VCSA (instructions have been updated below) to retrieve this information.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware and the behaviors described below could change in the future without notice.

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Interesting Kubernetes application demos

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I am always on the lookout for cool and interesting demos to deploy, especially with some of the work I have been doing lately with vSphere with Kubernetes (K8s) and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). I am sure many of you have probably seen the basic wordpress demos which seems to be the typical "Hello World" app for K8s and having something more compelling not only makes the demo more interesting but it can also help folks better understand how a modern applications can be built, deployed and run.

Below is a list of of the K8s demo applications that I have come across as part of my exploration and by no means is this an exhaustive list. I have been able to successfully deploy these applications running on the latest version of K8s (1.17 and 1.18) as I did come across other demos which did not work or I had issues setting up. If there are other K8s demos that folks have used, feel free to leave a comment and I will update the blog post after doing some basic testing.

For those of you who may not have a K8s environment and is running either vSphere 6.7 Update 3 or have access to a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC, you can easily setup a TKG Cluster in under 30 minutes leveraging my TKG Demo Appliance Fling.

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