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PowerShell community module for Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu

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In the previous blog post, we explored the Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu REST API and how it can be used for automation and more advanced workflows. To simplify the consumption of the App Transformer REST API and how I started to explore and learn about the APIs, I created a PowerShell module for App Transformer that implements a number of the App Transformer REST API that can easily be consumed using the following functions:

  • Connect-AppTransformer
  • Get-AppTransformerApplication
  • Get-AppTransformerComponent
  • Get-AppTransformerComponentSignature
  • Get-AppTransformerCredential
  • Get-AppTransformerNetworkInsight
  • Get-AppTransformerVCenter
  • Get-AppTransformerVM
  • New-AppTransformerCredential
  • New-AppTransformerCredentialAssociation
  • New-AppTransformerNetworkInsightCloud
  • New-AppTransformerVCenter
  • Remove-AppTransformerCredential
  • Start-AppTransformerIntrospection


🥳 To help celebrate the official GA of Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu today, I have just published my PowerShell Community Module for App Transformer into the PowerShell Gallery!

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Automating the deployment of Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu

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I recently wrote about our Application Transformer for VMware Tanzu solution and how it can really benefit IT Admins, beyond just the App Modernization use case which it was primarily designed for. App Transformer is provided as a Virtual Appliance (OVA) and the deployment using the vSphere UI is very straight forward. In this blog post, we will focus on automating the deployment of the App Transformer OVA.

To demonstrate the automation, I have created two example scripts, one that uses PowerCLI and the other using OVFTool. Both scripts contain the exact same variable names that will need to be updated by customers based on their environment. You can find the description for each variable blow covering both the appliance and application settings.

App Transformer Appliance Settings

  • AT_IP - IP Addres
  • AT_NETMASK - Netmask
  • AT_GATEWAY - Gateway
  • AT_DNS - DNS Server
  • AT_DNS_DOMAIN - DNS Search Domain
  • AT_DNS_SEARCH - DNS Search Path
  • AT_NTP - NTP Server
  • AT_ROOT_PASSWORD - Password for root (requires a minimum of 12 characters)

App Transformer Application Settings:

  • AT_USERNAME - Username to login to App Transformer UI
  • AT_PASSWORD - Password to login to App Transformer UI (requires a minimum of 12 characters)
  • AT_ENCRYPTION_PASSWORD - Password used to encrypt the database
  • AT_INSTALL_EMBEDDED_HARBOR - Install Embedded Harbor registry, useful for proof of concept/testing purposes

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vSphere Event-Driven Automation using Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) on Tanzu Community Edition

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Right before the holiday, I had spent some time exploring Tanzu Application Platform (TAP), which also recently GA'ed. TAP provides developers with an application-aware platform that focuses on making the developer experience easy for developing, building and running applications on Kubernetes.


If you are interested in a quick technical deep dive into TAP, check out this video by Scott Sisil, introducing TAP:

One of the core components of TAP is the Cloud Native Runtime (CNR), which is VMware's commercial offering of the popular open source project Knative. The VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) project also makes use of Knative as our backend to provide customers with an event-driven automation solution.

Early on in the VEBA project, we knew that we wanted to develop and innovate with the community in the open but we also understood there would be users who would want an officially supported offering that they can call or file support requests when needed. Early last year, Michael Gasch, the lead architect for VEBA started to port the code from the VMware Event Router, which is the heart of VEBA into CNR's Tanzu Sources for vSphere and start unifying the two code bases. The goal is to ensure that users of the open source project VEBA will also have a consistent user experience in terms of function deployment when using the commercial offering.

As shared back in Dec, I was able to successfully deploy TAP, CNR and Sources for vSphere all running in Tanzu Community Edition (TCE), which is a completely free Enterprise-grade Kubernetes available to anyone in the community to use. For those interested, you can find the instructions below on how to deploy and configure TAP to enable vSphere event-driven automation capabilities for your infrastructure. If you are interested in deploying this using the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Service, check out this other recent blog post that outlines the specific steps.

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