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New vCenter events for vSphere 7, VMware Cloud on AWS 1.10 and vSphere with Kubernetes

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Last year I published a Github repo which lists all the vCenter Server Events for a default installation for both vSphere 6.7 Update 3 and VMware Cloud on AWS 1.9. Since every vSphere environment is going to be unique with various 2nd and 3rd party solutions, I have also included a small PowerCLI script in the blog that you can use to generate the list of events for your own deployment.

With the release of vSphere 7 and VMware Cloud on AWS 1.10, I thought it was time to update the repo to see what's new which can be useful in a number of scenarios including using these events with the popular vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling.

One thing worth pointing out with the introduction of vSphere with Kubernetes in vSphere 7, is there are also specific vCenter events, a total of 23 that are available and I am sure more will come in the future. Below is a quick summary which is also included in the Github repo.

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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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Listing all Events for vCenter Server

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I had a conversation with one of our VMware Cloud on AWS field leaders a couple of weeks ago at reInvent on his initial experience with the vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) Fling. There were lots great feedback but one thing that stood out to me which looks to have been a barrier to getting started was being able to figure out a specific vCenter Event and its respective identifier. Although the list of "default" vCenter Events are documented in the vSphere API, it is definitely not the first place most folks would go to look nor is it very intuitive to browse.

To be honest, this is not a unique ask for VEBA. I have also seen this requests come up from customers who are automating vCenter Alarms, which can also be based off of vCenter Events and the same question has come up on before. One challenge with such a request is that the number and the types of vCenter Events will vary from customer to customer depending on the number of 2nd and 3rd party solutions deployed, not to mention it will also vary from version to version. In addition, as a customer, you can also publish your own custom Events into vCenter Server which makes this difficult to provide a single list that would cover all possible scenarios.

Ultimately, this ask is completely valid and I started to look at the vSphere API to see if there was something that could help. It did not take look before I stumbled onto the EventDescription which is part of the EventManager, which provides a nice registry for all currently registered vCenter Events. Time for some Automation 🙂

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