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ESXi running in unexpected places ...

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I am still blown away by the diversity of hardware platforms and environments that our customers continue to run their mission critical workloads using ESXi, VMware's Enterprise Type-1 Hypervisor. VMware ESXi is literally deployed in every market segment and vertical that you can imagine and even ones that you may not think of across land ⛰️, air 🛫, sea 🛳️ and even space 🚀.

I still vividly remember back in 2012, when ESXi was able to run on an Apple Mac Mini and how that enabled a new class of use cases for accelerated development and testing of iOS and MacOS applications that was just never possible before. In fact, this also enabled our partners like MacStadium, one of the largest Virtualized MacOS infrastructure provider running on VMware to deliever this offering as-a-service. Most recently, I also learned the popular Github Actions, specifically when using MacOS virtual environments, that it was also leveraging VMware under the hood which is very cool if you ask me!?

Another memorable moment was in 2018, a huge 🎤👊 at our VMworld conference when Ray O'Farrell (former VMware CTO) picked up a tiny device, which we learned was a Raspberry Pi running ESXi and VMware finally introduced to the world our ESXi-Arm initiative.

The ESXi Hypervisor has certainly come a long way from the early days of the VMware Hardware Compatibility (HCL) and VMware continues to expand into new markets and form factors like Data Processing Units (DPUs) as part of the recently announced Project Monterey. Edge computing is another area that is growing extremely rapidly and this recent article featuring our CEO Raghu states that "Edge computing is growing faster than Cloud" which will certainly drive further innovations with our ESXi platform to meet the needs of our customers.

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Quick Tip - Adding a vTPM (Virtual Trusted Platform Module) to a Nested ESXi VM

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I had an interesting question this morning asking whether it was possible to add a vTPM (Virtual Trusted Platform Module) to a Nested ESXi VM? The user was interested in testing a particular scenario with the new vSphere Trust Authority feature that was introduced in the vSphere 7.0. I personally had not done much with vTPM and I had assumed it should just work as long as you have a physical TPM chip in the underlying hardware and you have setup either a Standard or Native Key Provider within your vCenter Server.

The user observed that adding a vTPM to a Windows VM was possible using the vSphere UI but when attempting to perform the same operation on a Nested ESXi VM, the option to add vTPM device was not available. After spending ~30 minutes asking around for hardware that had a physical TPM, I remember that my Quartz Canyon NUC (NUC 9 Pro) is a Xeon based system and it has TPM 2.0 chip. I was able to take a closer look and quickly found the solution was very pretty straight forward!

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vSphere Event-Driven Automation using VMware Event Router on VMware Cloud on AWS with Knative or AWS EventBridge

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The VMware Event Broker Application (VEBA) is a popular VMware Event-Driven Automation solution that can be consumed using either the open source or commercial offering from VMware. The commercial offering of VEBA is already available to customers today via our Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) offering, which I have previously written about here. The open source offering of VEBA can be consumed in either a pre-packaged Virtual Appliance or a native Kubernetes Application called for those with an existing Kubernetes cluster.

Deploying the VEBA Virtual Appliance is well documented (here and here) and I wanted to spend some time covering the native Kubernetes deployment model, as it there are actually a couple of options and most recently, this came up in a customer discussions as they were interested in forwarding vSphere Events from VEBA to AWS EventBridge.

In the open source version of VEBA, there is a component called the VMware Event Router, which is responsible for connecting to an event source such as vCenter Server and then forwarding those events to a processor which can either be a a function that you have written to react to a specific event using Knative or to AWS EventBridge to integrate with other AWS native services like CloudWatch as an example.

To demonstrate the two different ways to deploy the VMware Event Router, I have created the following Github repo https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-event-driven-automation-vmware-event-router that provides an example to easily deploy the VMware Event Router to an existing Kubernetes cluster. For my environment, I will be using VMware Cloud on AWS and the managed Kubernetes offering called Tanzu services, which is included as part of the base offering and there is no additional cost of running the Kubernetes infrastructure, which is certainly an added bonus 😀

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