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VMworld 2020 Demo - Voice activated workload migration to VMware Cloud SDDCs

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One of my favorite but also most stressful part of preparing for a VMworld session is creating the demos. Even with a "virtual" VMworld this year, I personally felt it was even more stressful than a physical VMworld.

I have been presenting with Emad Younis for a number of years now and every year, we always end up with crazy ideas without thinking through all the feasibility aspects. This year was certainly no different and while working on our demo this year, I was seriously questioning my sanity and even the actual return on investment (ROI), if such a thing exists!? 😂

In case you have not watched our session, check out HCP132: Planes, Trains and Workload Mobility, you can watch it for free and see the full demo.


I was really floored by all the positive feedback that we had received from attendees which includes the VMworld survey but also on Twitter and Slack. This was one of my favorite tweet and response 😀

We really appreciate all the feedback and it definitely made up for some of the late nights where I was about to give up. I know a few of you were asking for more details about the demo and so this blog post will be focusing on some of the information I was not able to get to during the VMworld session.

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Forwarding vCenter Events into AWS EventBridge using vCenter Event Broker Appliance

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After attending Mike Deck's AWS reInvent session last year on Building event-driven architectures faster than ever with Amazon EventBridge, I could not help but draw a number of parallel concepts between AWS EventBridge and our recently released vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling. I thought it was a very interesting solution and certainly wanted to give it a try as I think it could really benefit some of our customers, especially for those already using our VMware Cloud on AWS solution and being able to take advantage of the various AWS Services in an event-driven fashion.


In fact, one of the use cases that I had in mind was one that we had from a VMware Cloud on AWS customer who wanted to take a vCenter Event and forward that off to AWS CloudWatch. The solution that I had shared last year was utilizing our vRealize Log Insight Cloud solution which is integrated into VMware Cloud on AWS and leveraging its webhook functionality to call into a AWS Lambda function which would then process the payload directly into CloudWatch. Although this solution works and I know several customers who have implemented something similiar, I think EventBridge could certainly provide a more flexible way to integrate not only with CloudWatch but almost any AWS Service or 3rd party service.

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Running sk8s (Simple Kubernetes) on VMC with an AWS Elastic Load Balancer

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Last week I wrote about a really nifty Virtual Appliance called sk8s which can be used to quickly setup a Kubernetes (k8s) cluster for development and testing purposes. If you have not checked out that article, be sure to give that a read first to get the full context. As mentioned in the previous article, sk8s runs great on any vSphere deployment but it can also run on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) which adds an additional capability where an AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) can automatically be provisioned and configured to front-end the k8s control plane as part of the deployment for external access.

The nice benefit of this is that you only need to configure access to the ELB and not directly to the underlying VMs running within the SDDC, both simplifying the setup but also reducing the need to expose the VMs directly to the internet. The write-up below is similar to that of the previous article, but it does expand into greater detail when deploying to VMC and all the required configuration changes within the VPC using the AWS Console and the Network and Security changes using the VMC Console.

Note: If you decide to use the integrated AWS ELB integration, please be aware that you will be charged for the consumption. For pricing, please see the AWS documentation here.

Prerequisites:

  • Access to the VMC Console and VMC SDDC
  • NSX-T Logical Network with DHCP enabled
  • AWS Access & Secret Key for automatically creating ELB (Optional)
  • govc

Step 1 - Install govc on your local desktop which has access to your VMC vSphere environment. If you have not installed govc, the quickest way is to simply download the latest binary, below is an example of installing the latest MacOS version:

curl -L https://github.com/vmware/govmomi/releases/download/v0.20.0/govc_darwin_amd64.gz | gunzip > /usr/local/bin/govc
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/govc

Step 2 - We need to verify a few settings in the AWS Console to ensure that the VPC that is connected to your SDDC is properly configured so that the provisioning of the ELB will be successful.

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