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Tech Preview of Horizon Provider for VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

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Last week, Michael Gasch and I had the pleasure of presenting the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution to the Omaha VMUG community. The session was an introduction to VEBA, but we also covered some brand new topics including writing your own functions for VEBA and a quick look at the evolution of VEBA.

Note: For those interested, the recording for the Omaha VMUG session can be accessed here with following password: MYN%0k9

One of the topics that I was really looking forward to sharing with the VMUG audience was a sneak peak at our upcoming v0.7 release which will include two new Event Providers: Webhook and VMware Horizon!

About a month back, I had teased some upcoming collaboration with Chris Halstead, famous for his VMware Horizon Flings and there was some good speculation and hope that this would mean VMware Horizon support for VEBA.

I am excited to share that we have been working on a new VMware Horizon Event Provider for VEBA and this will allow users to easily build and consume event-driven automation reacting to a number of VMware Horizon events! In fact, this was only made possible with the new Horizon Audit Events API that was recently introduced in the latest Horizon 2106 release which now has over 850 different events!

We are really excited to see what our users will do with this new functionality and if you are interested in trying out the Tech Preview of the VMware Horizon Provider for VEBA simply join the VEBA Slack Channel and you will be able to download the latest OVA appliance.

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Quick Tip - Preserving FQDN hostname on Photon OS

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Over the weekend, I was troubleshooting an issue that was reported by one of our VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) users who was helping with testing one of our upcoming features. The user found that after rebooting the VEBA appliance, the Antrea interfaces were no longer being re-created and pod networking seems to have been broken.

We initially thought it was related to switching to the latest Photon OS version or updating to the latest Antrea CNI release, since everything else was pretty much the same. Even after reverting both versions back to what we initially had, the reboot issue continued to persist. What was even more strange was that the current shipping version of the VEBA (v0.6.1) OVA was not experiencing this issue and had no problems with an OS reboot, which is something I have done many times.

The only logical conclusion that I could come up with to explain this problem is that a behavior change must have occurred within Photon OS from the time we built the previous appliance to what we are seeing now. While troubleshooting Antrea, it was pointed out that Kubernetes (K8s) node is probably unhealth and if so, I may want to look at the kubelet logs to see if it provided any hints. I initially did not both looking at the K8s layer, thinking this was related to change in Antrea since it handled pod networking. Looking at the kubelet logs, I found a ton of entries with the following:

396 kubelet.go:2243] node "veba" not found

I thought this was a bit strange, especially as our appliance has its hostname configurred with a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) which is veba.primp-industries.local and we had proper entries in both /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts.

Sure enough, when I ran hostname, they all returned the short hostname instead of the FQDN (which it returned properly prior to the reboot)

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Quick Tip - Dynamic OVF input properties using DeploymentOptions

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I first talked about OVF DeploymentOptions back in 2013, which enables an OVF/OVA author to define a set of deployment profiles (e.g. small, medium, large) which then automatically translate to a pre-defined set of compute, network and storage configurations when deploying an OVF/OVA. There are a number VMware Appliances that takes advantage of this OVF capability, the most well known is the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) when it prompts you to select the size of the VCSA that you wish to deploy.


Now although the primary driver for DeploymentOptions is for having out of the box resource configurations when deploying an OVF/OVA, it can also be used to control which OVF properties are shown to end users for input based on the selected deployment option.

I recently had a need for this capability and it was only after taking another look at the OVF specification, did I realize this was possible through the use of DeploymentOptions. Below is a quick example on how you can control specific OVF properties. Imagine, we have three deployment options: Development, Stage and Production which maps to the following DeploymentOption IDs: dev, stage and prod

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