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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 - Preserving FQDN hostname on Photon OS

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Over the weekend, I was troubleshooting an issue that was reported by one of our VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) users who was helping with testing one of our upcoming features. The user found that after rebooting the VEBA appliance, the Antrea interfaces were no longer being re-created and pod networking seems to have been broken.

We initially thought it was related to switching to the latest Photon OS version or updating to the latest Antrea CNI release, since everything else was pretty much the same. Even after reverting both versions back to what we initially had, the reboot issue continued to persist. What was even more strange was that the current shipping version of the VEBA (v0.6.1) OVA was not experiencing this issue and had no problems with an OS reboot, which is something I have done many times.

The only logical conclusion that I could come up with to explain this problem is that a behavior change must have occurred within Photon OS from the time we built the previous appliance to what we are seeing now. While troubleshooting Antrea, it was pointed out that Kubernetes (K8s) node is probably unhealth and if so, I may want to look at the kubelet logs to see if it provided any hints. I initially did not both looking at the K8s layer, thinking this was related to change in Antrea since it handled pod networking. Looking at the kubelet logs, I found a ton of entries with the following:

396 kubelet.go:2243] node "veba" not found

I thought this was a bit strange, especially as our appliance has its hostname configurred with a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) which is veba.primp-industries.local and we had proper entries in both /etc/hostname and /etc/hosts.

Sure enough, when I ran hostname, they all returned the short hostname instead of the FQDN (which it returned properly prior to the reboot)

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Packer reference for VMware Harbor Virtual Appliance

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I recently had a need to setup a container registry for a project that I was working on and Harbor was of course my default choice. Although Harbor is pretty easy to setup, I did not want to manually go through the installation each time I needed Harbor and I figured it was time to build my own Harbor Virtual Appliance (OVA), just like I have shown in the past with these reference implementations here and here.

UPDATE (02/03/23) - VMware has productized and is now shipping an official VMware Harbor Virtual Appliance (OVA) as part of the latest Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (2.1) release.

For those interested, you can find the reference implementation for building a Harbor Virtual Appliance at https://github.com/lamw/harbor-appliance

When deploying the Harbor Appliance, you will find the basic OVF properties that I have encoded including networking, credentials, debugging and advanced settings. Hopefully should be pretty straight forward for anyone who has deployed an OVA before to vSphere.

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