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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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Quick Tip - Access the RabbitMQ management UI when using the Kubernetes operator

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I was recently working with the RabbitMQ Cluster Kubernetes Operator, which provides an easy way to deploy and manage RabbitMQ clusters using Kubernetes (k8s). In fact, the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution also makes use of RabbitMQ operator as part of its backend infrastructure.

While troubleshooting my RabbitMQ deployment yesterday, I came to learn about a really useful tip in accessing the RabbitMQ management console UI which provides a number of useful pieces of information including resource utilization. Once logged in, we quickly found the issue which was due to memory pressure and once that was resolved, everything was working as expected.


I was not aware that RabbitMQ had this useful dashboard and that you could easily access it once you knew how to retrieve the credentials.

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Cluster API BYOH Provider on Photon OS (Arm) with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) and ESXi-Arm

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Last week I demonstrated how to take advantage of the new Kubernetes Cluster API Bring Your Own Host (BYOH) Provider with a VM running on ESXi-Arm and managed with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE). The Cluster API BYOH Provider is currently only tested and supported with an Ubuntu OS, but since the only requirements for a linux host was simply: kubeadm, kubelet and containerd, I figured it should also be possible with VMware's Photon OS which also has an Arm edition.

With a TON of trial/error and reverting snapshots, I was able to finally get Cluster API BYOH Provider to successful run on Photon OS as shared in a recent tweet.

What actually made this possible was actually the work I had done with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) project which also involves Photon OS and Kubernetes. More specifically, I had recently worked on porting VEBA from using the Docker runtime to Containerd with Kubernetes and that prior experience was invaluable while figuring out how to do this with Photon OS (Arm) which also had its own challenges. The instructions below will help setup a Photon OS (Arm) VM that can then be used with Cluster API BOYH Provider and the previous article will still need to be reference for the complete setup.

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