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Publishing and consuming custom events with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

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One of the really exciting features that will be included in the upcoming release of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) v0.7 release (currently in Tech Preview) is the support for incoming webhooks! This will allow customers to easily build event-driven automation for non-vSphere based events and even non-VMware events while still maintaining a consistent consumption experience. If you are interested in learning more about the upcoming VEBA v0.7 release, Michael Gasch and myself will be doing a LIVE VMworld Session - VEBA Revolutions - Unleashing the Power of Event-Driven Automation #CODE2773 that you should definitely add to your schedule builder!

Webhook support can easily be enabled during the initial VEBA appliance deployment using a few new OVF properties or configured through the VMware Event Router configuration when deploying to an existing Kubernetes cluster using kubectl or Helm. Once the webhook endpoint is running, users can simply publish their custom events as a conformant CloudEvent and VEBA will ensure these custom events are immediately available for consumption by function authors. This means any product and/or service that can construct a custom HTTP payload including headers will be able to take advantage of this new VEBA feature! I also want to mention that this is NOT the only way to produce custom events that VEBA can ingest, but is certainly one simple way.

To help make this concept more concrete, I wanted to see how we could integrate VMware Cloud events into VEBA by using this new webhook mechanism and using the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway. Below is a diagram to help illustrate what is happens when a VMware Cloud event is generated and how it can be consumed by VEBA. The beauty of this type of a solution is the "Event Producer" does not have to know anything about the "Event Consumer" or how they might consume the data. The producer simply pushes events into VEBA and if there is a consumer who cares about a specific event and wishes to do something about it, they can create a function that will listen for a specific event(s) and perform an operation like sending to Slack as an example.

  1. Event is produced by VMware Cloud and pushed by the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW)
  2. A conformant CloudEvent payload is constructed from VMware Cloud event by NGW service
  3. NGW forwards the custom CloudEvent to VEBA's webhook endpoint (https://[VEBA-FQDN]/webhook)
  4. VEBA functions can now react to these custom CloudEvents (e.g. SDDC Provisioned Event)

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Quick Tip - How to deploy NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX-ALB) with a single Service Engine

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I saw an interesting question today from Robert Kloosterhuis in the private vExpert App Modernization Slack Channel who working with vSphere with Tanzu using NSX Advanced Load Balancer (NSX-ALB) and wanted to know if it was possible to deploy NSX-ALB with just a single Service Engine (SE)?

The default behavior of NSX-ALB is to deploy two SE for availability purpose but for testing and/or homelab usage, it could certainly help with resources and time to spin up an environment using NSX-ALB. I was also curious if this was possible and reached out to NSX-ALB Engineering team and within a few minutes, I got a response that not only was this possible to do but pretty easy to configure.

To modify this default behavior, we need to update the Service Engine group prior to SE VMs being deployed. To do so, login to NSX-ALB UI and under Infrastructure->Service Engine Group and then click on the Advanced tab and change the default Buffer Service Engines value of 1 to 0 which will will have NSX-ALB deploy just a single SE VM rather than the default two.


To confirm that our NSX-ALB have been configured correctly, I have enabled vSphere with Tanzu using NSX-ALB and as you can see from the screenshot below, only a single SE VM has been deployed rather than the default behavior of two SE.

VMware 2021 Cycling Kit

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It looks like while I was out on PTO, the VMware 2021 Cycling Kits (Men/Woman) went live on VMware's official Merchandise Store. I know many of you have been asking about prior VMware Cycling Kits and you now have the opportunity to ride in style with the latest VMware 2021 Cycling Kits.

UPDATE (08/25/21) - I just found out there was a small window for ordering the cycling kits which officially ended on 8/20 and was only extended for a few more days. Unfortunately, it looks like the vendor is no longer accepting any orders. Apologies for this as I had only found out after coming back from PTO earlier this week and was not aware of the deadline.

Note: I also saw that the description for the bibs, shorts and jersey all list "LIMITED TIME", so I imagine these will not be around forever and if you are interested, definitely get your order in as soon as you can