WilliamLam.com

ESXi on Protectli Vault Pro 6650/6670

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I always love hearing about new and interesting hardware vendors from our VMware community, which is exactly how I came to learn about Protectli back in 2021 from fellow vExpert Trevor Smith. It was in 2021 where Trevor had shared with the vExpert Community that Protectli was developing a 10GbE hardware kit, which was really interesting since there was not many options for small form factor systems at that time that included 10GbE connectivity.

After following up with Protectcli in 2021, they confirmed a 10GbE kit was in the works but it was still in early design and development, so there was nothing to evaluate at the time. Fast forward to April 2024, I received a follow-up email asking if I would be interested in kicking the tires on their first 10GbE kits with their new Protectli Vault Pro 6600 series.


So here is your first look at the ESXi running on the new Protectli 10G Vault Pro!

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Automated Aria Suite (Lifecycle, Identity, Operations, Logs & Automation) Lab Deployment Script

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I recently got reacquainted with the Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager (ASLCM) solution, which makes it super easy for anyone to manage the deployment, configuration and lifecycle for the complete Aria suite of products including Aria Identity, Aria Operations, Aria Operations for Logs and Aria Automation.

Users can deploy the various Aria products in either standalone or clustered mode (for high availability purposes), with the former being ideal for learning and homelab purposes. In addition to deploying ASLCM and the individual Aria products, I wanted to also use this as an opportunity explore the ASLCM REST API and what better way to learn than to have a use case to get hands on experience.

While ASLCM already provides a simple way to deploy Aria products using the UI and includes a nice export/import feature for an environment configuration in JSON, I wanted to do the same, but programmatically using the ASLCM REST API to fully configure the environment.

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VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) v0.8.0

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I am very excited to share that we have just released our long awaited v0.8.0 of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)! 🥳


The v0.8.0 release has been in the works for quite some time and because of the major architectural change in migrating to the VMware Tanzu Sources for Knative, we also needed to update all example functions to reflect the new event payload schema, refresh all user documentation and our VEBA website, which only performed during our spare cycles and typically in the evenings!

It has certainly been a long journey and I could not have done it without my colleague Robert Guske, who has been a machine in updating all of our documentation to make it easier to consume for both our existing and new users. 🙌

Last but now least, I want to give a huge thanks 👏 to my original partner in crime Michael Gasch, while he is no longer with VMware, he was still kind enough to help answer some questions while hitting some release automation issue over the weekend and was instrumental in helping me get the v0.8.0 release out!

Changelog for VEBA v0.8.0:

  • Updated Software Build-of-Material (SBOM) (See the VEBA BOM for detailed changes)
  • Replaced VMware Event Router with VMware Tanzu Sources for Knative
  • All VEBA endpoints now protected with basic authentication
  • New Google Chat notification function
  • Migrated function container images from Google (GCR) to Github (GHCR)
  • Updated all PowerShell/PowerCLI functions with the latest PS/PCLI base images
  • Improved website documentation
  • Various Bug Fixes and Code Improvement

Download for VEBA v0.8.0: