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VEBA + Knative + k3s on ESXi-Arm

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In response to a customer request to add Arm64 support for our VMware Event Router, I have been spending some more time playing with k3s (lightweight Kubernetes distribution for Arm) running on ESXi-Arm using a Raspberry Pi. Not only was this a good learning experience that exposed to me to the broader Arm ecosystem, which is still maturing but it also took me down several 🐰🕳️ which got me exploring new tools that I had never used before such as Buildpacks and Docker buildx to name a few.

This past weekend, I was finally successful in setting up our VMware Event Router for Arm using the Knative processor on a k3s cluster using ESXi-Arm running on a Raspberry Pi 4b 8GB model! As of writing this, the following versions were used:

  • Knative Serving v0.20.0
  • Knative Net Contour v0.20.0
  • Knative Eventing v0.20.1
  • RabbitMQ Cluster Operator v0.5.0

In addition, I was able to also convert the Knative python echo function that was originally created by my colleague Michael Gasch and build an Arm64 version of the Knative python echo function which demonstrates the integration of VEBA with the Knative processor connected to a vCenter Server as my event source.

For those interested in just the VMware Event Router Arm64 image, you can access it here and we plan to make that an official image shortly. For those interested in setting up a fully functional Arm deployment of VEBA and Knative processor, you can find the detailed instructions below.

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Quick Tip - How to retrieve deleted VM history?

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Here is another question that can be solved by leveraging vCenter Server Events, which provides a lot of useful information, especially for historical operations and auditing purposes. Simliar to identifying where a VM was cloned from use case, we can also use vCenter events to retrieve the historical events for all VM deletions for a given vSphere environment.

One important thing to note is that when a VM or any other vSphere object for that matter that has been deleted, all references to that object is removed from vCenter Server. This means, we can not look for events for a give VM but instead, we need to look at the Task-based Event types to actually retrieve this information.

Putting this together, I have created a PowerCLI function called Get-VmDeleteHistory which can be installed directly from the PowerShell Gallery by running:

Install-Script -Name VmDeleteHistory

After connecting to your vCenter Server using the Connect-VIServer cmdlet, you can then run the Get-VmDeleteHistory function which uses the Get-VIEvent cmdlet and looks at the last 500 events. Below is an example output of what you will see which is the VM that was deleted, the User who performed the action along with the date and time.


If you want to look further back in history, you can provide the optional -MaxSamples parameter and that will allow you to specify the maximum number of events to look through.

Get-VmDeleteHistory -MaxSamples 1000

It is also important to understand that how far back you can go is based on your vCenter Server's Task/Event retention configuration.

Custom notification and automation based on host failure in VMware Cloud on AWS

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Physical hardware failure is inevitable, this is true whether it is running in your on-premises datacenter or in the Cloud like VMware Cloud on AWS. Although vSphere HA will automatically restart all affected VMs after detecting a host failure, there is usually additional activities that must be performed by a customer such as notifying all impacted application owners and even creating an incident ticket for hardware replacement.

With VMware Cloud on AWS, the hardware replacement is done automatically for you but the downstream activity of notifying application owners to verify the application is functional is still managed by the customer. There are many ways in how customers can manage such incidents and one solution that I am a huge advocate of is taking advantage of the powerful vCenter Server Events, which has over 1700+ events, not to mention any of the 2nd/3rd party events.

When an ESXi host fails, the com.vmware.vc.HA.DasHostFailedEvent event will be generated which contains all the relavent information related to the host failure including the specific hostname/IP, when the incident occurred and details about the vSphere Cluster and Datacenter is also provided. This information is visible using the vSphere UI but it can also be programmatically retrieved using the vSphere API, which is how the vSphere UI renders this information.

Note: Everything described in this blog post including the VEBA example is applicable to any environment that contains vCenter Server and is not limited to just VMware Cloud on AWS.

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