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Updated Character Limits for vSphere Objects

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I recently saw a question asking about the character limit for the various vSphere Inventory Objects like a Datacenter or Virtual Machine as an example. I was not aware of anything formally documented, but I did come across this 2018 blog post by fellow colleague Todd Simmons, who did some testing with vSphere 6.7 and shared his initial results.


I was curious myself on whether these limits have changed but I also noticed there were many other vSphere Objects that were not tested. I figured this would be an interesting exercise to re-evaluate against the latest vSphere 7.0 Update 2 release and using some PowerShell code like the following to help:

$str = "w" * 80

Below are my findings which have been verified using the vSphere UI and I have also expanded the object list to cover more recent solutions such as vSphere with Tanzu.

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VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) v0.6 is now available!

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I am super excited today to announce the release of version v0.6 of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)! The team and I have been heads down for the past several months working on a number of exciting and brand new capabilities that I think both, existing and new customers, will really enjoy.

In addition to the core team and community contributions, I would also like to welcome and thank two of our newest contributors to the VEBA project, both making significant contributions to our v0.6 release:

Release v0.6 is an important milestone for the team and for the VEBA project. VEBA now leverages an end-to-end VMware OSS stack by default, which also provides a strong architectural foundation for future product updates and innovations. We could not be more excited to share this release with our community 🥳 and below are just some of the key feature highlights.

Embedded Knative


Knative is a Kubernetes-based platform to deploy and manage modern serverless workloads. Support for Knative in VEBA was first introduced in our v0.5 release last December and only supported an external Knative deployment. With this latest release, VEBA now supports an embedded Knative deployment which includes the full Knative Serving and Eventing components which is automatically configured within VEBA.

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Disabling vSphere with Tanzu does not delete NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB) Service Engine (SE) VMs

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While working on some automation to deploy a vSphere 7.0 Update 2 environment that has been configured with vSphere with Tanzu and NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX ALB), I noticed that when you disable Workload Management on a vSphere Cluster, the two NSX ALB Service Engine (SE) VMs were still left behind.


It turns out that this behavior is due to a default setting within NSX ALB that will NOT automatically delete the SE's in the case there is a scaled up event which would then cause a re-deploy to happen. Instead, by default it is configured to wait 120 minutes (2hrs) before cleaning up.

If you wish to change this behavior, you can login to NSX ALB UI and navigate to Infrastructure->Service Engine->Advanced and update the "Delete Unused Service Engines After" to your desired value. Please note, that the shortest time interval to wait is 1 minute and if you set it to 0, it means the SE's VMs not be deleted.


After saving this change, the next time you disable Workload Management, the SE VMs will automatically get cleaned based on the time interval you had configured.