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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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How to restrict vSphere UI access while maintaining vSphere API functionality?

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Although I come across a fair amount of interesting and challenging questions posed by our customers, I have to say this is certainly one of the more stranger question that continues to surface every so often. The question itself is fairly straight forward, but what I find strange is the reasoning and justifications for needing such a solution.

In case the title was not a give away, the question is having the ability to restrict a set of user(s) from the vSphere UI while still allowing access to the vSphere API for these same user(s). To be clear, the behavior of vSphere is that if you have vSphere UI access, then you also have vSphere API access which is all based on the permissions a user or group has been granted. There is no way to distinguish or limit access between these interfaces including any vSphere SDK or PowerCLI usage which also relies on vSphere API access.

There may be valid use cases for needing such a capability, however from my experience in talking with our customers and field, it feels like this is an attempt to solve organizational and/or process issues. Let give you a few examples that I have come across over the years:

  • I need to prevent [team|individual] from using the vSphere UI, because they are not using the internal provisioning tools we have built
  • I need to prevent [team|individual] from using the vSphere UI, because they need to learn how to automate using the vSphere API
  • I need to prevent [individual] in [team] from using the vSphere UI, because they are making changes to VMs without filing support tickets
  • I need to prevent [individual] on my [team] from using the vSphere UI, because they are bypassing our change control policies

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Quick Tip - Microsoft Power Automate expression to access specific row from Excel workbook

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Microsoft Power Automate is a pretty nifty service that allow users to automate various business processes using Microsoft Office 365 as well as supporting other 3rd party integrations. For a particular project I have been working on, I have been trying to figure out the best way to access a specific row of information from an Excel workbook such as the example below.


For anyone that does not have a scripting or programming background, Power Automate is relatively easy to use for basic process automation. However, if you have some scripting background, then the tool can feel a bit clunky, especially since each action must be manually created, one at a time and there are no bulk operations or even the ability to quickly duplicate an action for editing.

For my initial prototype, I had used multiple Excel Get Row action to fetch a specific row from my Excel workbook to be able to reference it later in my automation. Not only was this not optimal but I also ran into a number of connection issues since I had up to 40 of these actions. I had searched online and various Power Automate forums for better solution which would allow me to read the Excel data once and then reference it when I needed. From what I could find, most examples focused on a specific row within the document or required looping through the table which did not help me since I needed to be able to access a particular row on-demand.

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