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Tips & Tricks for deploying VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) using Holodeck

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The VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Holodeck Toolkit has become quite popular amongst our field teams for quickly spinning up a fully self-contained VCF environment, running on just a single physical ESXi host for educational and hands on experience.

Internally, we have a Holodeck Google Space which has been getting quite busy where folks can ask questions but also share their own experiences and setup using Holodeck. I had noticed there were some common questions and themes that were coming up along with some neat tips and tricks from various folks, some of which I also found quite insightful.

I know some of these tips and tricks will also benefit our customers and partners looking to deploy VCF using Holodeck, so I figure I put together a consolidated list that would benefit everyone. If you have other Holodeck tips and tricks, feel free to leave a comment and happy to keep updating this page.

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Google Chat space notification for failed vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) backups using VEBA

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It is always good idea to verify that your vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) backups are occurring and if there are any failures, you are notified about them immediately!

As alluded to at the end of that blog post, you can easily build event-driven automation using the popular VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution, triggering notifications based on several types of VCSA backup events:

  • com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.job.failed.event
  • com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.job.finished.event
  • com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.job.start.event

I recently built a PowerShell function that would send a notification to a Google Chat space by enabling their incoming webhook integration as you can seen from the screenshot below:


While the message customization is not as extensive as using Slack (e.g. supporting advanced layouts and emoji), it does get the job done and you will know immediately when a backup has failed or when it has started or has completed.

Note: For existing VEBA users (pre-v0.8 release), the function.yaml needs to be updated to trigger off of the subject keyword rather than the type, which is due to replacing the event router with Tanzu Sources for vSphere. You also need to ensure the prefix of "com.vmware.vsphere" is removed along with trailing "v0" as this is the next syntax for vCenter Events once VEBA v0.8 is released.

spec:
  broker: default
  filter:
    attributes:
      subject: com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.job.failed.event

Quick Tip - Verifying vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Backup Status

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I recently found out that my vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) scheduled backups had been failing for some time but I was not aware. While there is a default vCenter Server alarm for failed VCSA backups, however it is only visible when you have selected the vCenter Server inventory object in left hand navigation, which is not a typical item that I select as shown in the screenshot below.


Furthermore, I was actually logged into the VCSA's VMware Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) not too long ago while updating to a newer patch release and I had checked to see if backups were successful, which I thought they were when looking at the "Status" column.


It was not until I took a closer look, did I realize that the schedule backup activity log is ordered from oldest to newest, meaning what I saw was a backup that has happend a long time ago and not necessary the latest backup attempt. I found this to be a really strange UX since as you would need to page to very end to check whether the latest backups were succssful or not.

Note: I have already filed an internal bug to ask for the VCSA schedule backup activity to be ordered from newest to oldest, so users can quickly see if the latest backups are successful or not.

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