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What is vc-ws1a-broker service on vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)?

09.07.2023 by William Lam // 2 Comments

When vSphere 8.0 Update 1 was released, I noticed an interesting message about containers being installed while deploying the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) ...

Interesting ... while runc has been part of the VCSA for a few releases, it looks like it now launches ws1a-broker container in #vSphere80U1 by default ... ws1a-broker = Workspace One Broker? pic.twitter.com/cNVwx2vwFA

— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) April 18, 2023

As shared in the Tweet/X above, it turns out this was for a service called vc-ws1a-broker, which I came to learn was for enabling the new Identity Federation Provider for the VCSA with Okta.

I ended up correctly guessing that the vc-ws1a-broker process was indeed our very own VMware Workspace One Access (WS1A) application but running as a Container workload within the VCSA. In vSphere 8.0 Update 2, support for Microsoft EntraID (formally Azure AD) is now also possible as additional identity provider option.

One important thing to be aware of the vc-ws1a-broker service is that it is configured to be able to consume up to 2GB of memory, as shown using the cloudvm-ram-size utility in the screenshot below.

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Support for read-only VMDK in vSphere 8.0 Update 2

09.05.2023 by William Lam // 3 Comments

vSphere 8.0 Update 2 was just announced last week at VMware Explore and it brings a lot of exciting new capabilities, check out this What's New in vSphere 8.0 Update 2 and What's New in vSAN 8.0 Update 2 blog posts for a nice summary of all the new features.

While doing some testing in my vSphere 8.0 Update 2 lab, I came to learn about a really cool feature that has been requested by customers over the years, which is the ability to configure a read-only virtual disk (VMDK). The most common use case for this feature is being able to share a single VMDK across multiple Virtual Machines and prevent any changes to the original data, a common scenario for VMware App Volumes or VMware Horizon environments.

I could also see this capability get leveraged by users as a way to distribute and install software where traditional application management systems are unavailable but still ensuring that workloads can not manipulate or modify the original files, definitely opens the door for some interesting capabilities.

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First look at Project Keswick

08.28.2023 by William Lam // 2 Comments

VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator (VECO) was announced at VMware Explore US last week and one of the components that it is built on is using something called Project Keswick.

@alanrenouf and Elliot now on stage to talk about Project Keswick which VECO is built on #VMwareExplore pic.twitter.com/v9r29qDLIX

— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) August 23, 2023

In fact, at VMware Explore, Project Keswick was officially launched and is now available for customers to try out! I was fortunate enough to attend the Project Keswick technical deep dive session in person, but if you were not able to make the session or you were not at VMware Explore, the session recording is already available online for free to watch #VIB2169LV Scaling and Deploying ESXi at the Edge with Desired State Management and GitOps.

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