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Integrating VMware Cloud Notification Gateway with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

07.29.2020 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

I previously wrote about the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) which provides curated notifications delivered to VMware Cloud on AWS users. By default, NGW supports several  types of notification channels such as email, VMware Cloud Console UI, VMware Cloud Activity Log, vRealize Log Intelligence Cloud (vRLIC) and the vSphere UI when using the vCenter Cloud Gateway. A lesser known feature of NGW is the ability to extend into even more channels by leveraging its webhook functionality which is available when using NGW API.

For a basic "pass through" of the NGW notification to another cloud service such as Slack or Microsoft Teams as example, you can simple setup an incoming webhook on Slack or Microsoft Teams, which I had covered in the previous blog post. From there, you can configure an NGW subscription and forward the NGW notification to the specified incoming webhook.

For more interesting scenarios where customers may want to perform some additional data processing when the NGW notification arrives or run some code/automation and integrate that with other systems which can include your on-premises infrastructure, the basic webhook workflow is not sufficient. Having said that, at the end of the previous blog post I did hint at a solution that would enable customers to support such scenarios which is by leveraging the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution.


The way this works is that we are still taking advantage of the NGW webhook capability but instead of forwarding the NGW notification to a cloud service that supports an incoming webhook, we are sending it to VEBA for processing. Once the notification has been received by VEBA, customers can apply additional logic by using any language of their choice which runs as an automated function and is then responsible for sending the final payload to its destination. This is really the power of VEBA which enables customers to perform any additional processing or business logic to an event before sending it out to its intended target.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, VMware Cloud on AWS Tags // Notification Gateway, VMC, VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware Event Broker Appliance

Using the new installation method for deploying OpenShift 4.5 on VMware Cloud on AWS

07.18.2020 by William Lam // 1 Comment

I recently saw a tweet from Jason Shiplett who works over on the VMware Validated Design (VVD) team (also my former team before joining VMware Cloud) who shared a new validated design for running Redhat OpenShift 4.3 on VMware Cloud Foundation. Funny enough, a couple of days ago I was just researching into deploying OpenShift running on VMware Cloud on AWS from a customer inquiry.

Timing could not have been better as RedHat just announced their OpenShift 4.5 release a few days ago as and one of the major updates is support for vSphere using their full stack automation also known as te Installer Provisioned Infrastructure (IPI) option. Previous to this, customers who wanted to deploy OpenShift on vSphere had to use the User Provisioned Infrastructure (UPI) method, which the VVD design also uses, which is much lengthier and complex when compared to the native IPI method.

For someone who has never worked with OpenShift before, this was great news and I get to try out this new deployment method on an VMware Cloud on AWS infrastructure 🙂

Pre-Requisites:

Step 1 - You will need a Linux system to perform the installation and it should have access to the vCenter Server running in VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC). In my example, I am using an Ubuntu Server 20.04 VM which is also running in the SDDC and has outbound internet connectivity.

Step 2 - Login to VMware Cloud on AWS console and create a new NSX-T network segment that is DHCP enabled. In my example, I named it openshift-network with a 192.168.3.0/24 configuration.


Step 3 - Navigate to Inventory->Groups and create the following groups and replace the CIDR networks with that of your SDDC:

Group Name IP Address Members
Compute OpenShift Network 192.168.3.0/24
Compute SDDC Management Network 10.2.0.0/16
Management OpenShift Network 192.168.3.0/24

[Read more...]

Categories // Kubernetes, VMware Cloud on AWS Tags // Kubernetes, OpenShift, VMware Cloud on AWS

Retrieving network statistics on VMware Cloud on AWS using NSX-T Policy API

07.16.2020 by William Lam // 1 Comment

One question that has come up lately from VMware Cloud on AWS customers is to understand their network traffic usage, especially as it pertains to traffic that exit or egress their SDDC. There are a number of graphical tools that can be used today to get insights into this information, one is the popular vRealize Network Insight Cloud solution which many of our VMware Cloud on AWS customers are taking advantage of to not only understand traffic usage and flow data history but is also instrumental in aiding customers when planning workload migrations from their on-premises datacenter to VMware Cloud on AWS.

While researching this topic, I also came to learn that this information can be retrieved using the NSX-T Policy API which is available to all customers to use. We are going to be leveraging the Tier-0 statistics interface API from NSX-T which will give us both transmit and receive stats on all supported interfaces. From the diagram below, we can see the interfaces that are applicable to VMware Cloud on AWS is the Internet interface which includes VPN traffic, VPC interface which includes traffic going to Linked VPC and Direct Connect interface which includes traffic when using AWS Direct Connect.

NSX-T Topology in VMware Cloud on AWS

As you might expect, these exact same three interface types is then represented as logical interfaces within the NSX-T Policy API which uses the following IDs:

  • cross-vpc
  • public
  • direct-connect

Note: Statistics on the Direct Connect interface will also include traffic if you are using the new VMware Transit Connect with AWS Transit Gateway feature.

These interface can be discovered by performing a GET on /policy/api/v1/infra/tier-0s/vmc/locale-services/default/interfaces and then you would then identify the two NSX-T Edge (Active/Passive) and construct the T0 URL to retrieve the statistics. I will not bore you with the details and have implemented this as a new PowerShell function called Get-NSXTT0Stats and for those interested in the implementation, please see the code here.

Note: For those wanting to see the full NSX-T Policy REST URLs, simply append -Troubleshoot flag and that will output additional information on how I am retrieving the various pieces of information required to call into the T0 Stats API.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, NSX, VMware Cloud on AWS Tags // NSX-T, VMware Cloud on AWS

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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