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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.

Categories // vSphere Tags // VEBA, VMware Event Broker Appliance, vrealize orchestrator, vRO

Sneak peek at deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Grid on vSphere & VMware Cloud on AWS

03.16.2020 by William Lam // 1 Comment

Last week, VMware had its huge launch which included VMware Cloud Foundation 4, vSphere 7, vSAN 7 and the brand new VMware Tanzu Portfolio that will help organizations build, run and manage modern applications for their business. Although we still have a couple of more months before general availability, the level of excitement for these upcoming releases was pretty amazing to see on social media, especially for the highly anticipated Kubernetes with vSphere capability, formally known as Project Pacific.

UPDATE (04/10/20) - TKG 1.0 has officially GA'ed, you can now deploy TKG Clusters using the new TKG CLI/UI as demonstrated in this blog post.

  • TKG Release Notes
  • TKG Download
  • TKG Documentation

When vSphere 7 is available, Kubernetes with vSphere is just one way in which customers will be able to deploy upstream and conformant Open Source Kubernetes also referred to as Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG). For customers that require a solution today or for those that may not able to upgrade to vSphere 7 immediately, VMware has another option called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus for vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS which was also announced last week but albeit not many folks took notice.


There are few things worth mentioning about Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus:

  1. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus is a new offering that is comprised of the core TKG software and it includes support from VMware's Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE), which is a team made up of Kubernetes Architects that can help customers design and architect their Cloud Native Applications running on the VMware Tanzu Platform
  2. For customers that do not require CRE support and just want standard VMware GSS Support, then you can simply use Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) which includes VMware Support and Subscription (SnS)
  3. The core TKG software which Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Plus includes can deploy Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster (upstream K8s running in VMs). Customers can already do this right now by using Cluster API (CAPI) and specifically the Cluster API Provider for vSphere (CAPV) which provides lifecycle management of Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster running on any valid vSphere endpoint including VMware Cloud on AWS. The latest CAPV v1alpha3 release also introduces a new workflow that reduces the number of steps compared to v1alpha2 which is now deprecated

For customers that want to further customize how Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster are deployed and configured including tools that they are already using, CAPV will be the most flexible option. Having gone through the CAPV workflows myself, I think it can still be daunting if you are new to this space, not to mention the different CLI tools that you will have to learn to have a successful deployment. Luckily, the VMware TKG team has also been thinking about the overall user experience and how they can build on top of CAPV to provide a much more simpler and more intuitive interface for customers that is just looking for a turnkey option.

Here is a sneak peek (Technical Preview) of the upcoming Tanzu Kubernetes Grid CLI or TKG CLI for short which will make deploying Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster on ANY vSphere endpoint incredibly EASY!

[Read more...]

Categories // Kubernetes, VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Tanzu Tags // Kubernetes, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, TKG, TKG CLI, VMware Cloud on AWS

Using vRO REST API to execute a workflow with SDK objects

03.13.2020 by William Lam // 3 Comments

I was working on something last week which involved vRealize Orchestrator and I wanted to execute a vRO worklfow but rather than using the UI, I wanted to use the vRO REST API. Although there are a couple of blog posts such as this one which demonstrates how to use the vRO REST API, they all use a very simple workflow that only contains string inputs. In my opinion, this does not actually reflect practical workflows which usually contains a mix of strings but also SDK-based objects like vSphere VMs, ESXi hosts, Networks, etc.

It actually took me awhile to wrap my head around how to call these more complex workflows using the vRO REST API and after a ton of trial/error and some help from Kasey Linden and one of the vRO Engineers, I now have a method in which users can follow to identify the required payload for a given vRO workflow when using the vRO REST API. The instructions below is using the latest vRO 8.0.1 release which has a new HMTL5 UI, it has been awhile and I am not sure when this new UI was introduced but the instructions may work for older clients but I would recommend standing up the latest version for developing your automation.

Step 1 - Retrieve the vRO workflow ID by selecting the workflow in the vRO UI. In the example below, my Tag a VM workflow ID is 9d95c7f5-a563-413f-af42-fd7e09275216

[Read more...]

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // REST API, vrealize orchestrator

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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