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How to modernize your vSphere Alarm actions using the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)?

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The VMware Event Broker Application/Appliance (VEBA) solution makes it extremely easy for customers to build Event-Driven Automation that can react to over 1800+ vSphere-based Events using your favorite scripting or programming language of choice that includes PowerCLI, PowerShell, Python and Go to just name a few.

The benefits of VEBA can extend beyond just vSphere Events and can also be used with both new and existing vSphere Alarms. In fact, vSphere Alarms is just another a type of vSphere Event, which then makes it super easy to work with if you are already familiar with VEBA. Similar to the "triggers" that are supported with vSphere Events, the available options for extensibility in vCenter Server is super limited.


In addition to the limited options for extending vCenter Server, there are also valid security concerns with resource utilization and opening up access to run arbitrary scripts directly on the VCSA, which we all know is a bad practice for so many reasons. What if we could easily extend the actions to a vSphere Alarm to send notifications to Slack or Microsoft Teams, automatically file an IT Ticket or run specific automation or remediations tasks!?

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VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) v0.6 is now available!

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I am super excited today to announce the release of version v0.6 of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)! The team and I have been heads down for the past several months working on a number of exciting and brand new capabilities that I think both, existing and new customers, will really enjoy.

In addition to the core team and community contributions, I would also like to welcome and thank two of our newest contributors to the VEBA project, both making significant contributions to our v0.6 release:

Release v0.6 is an important milestone for the team and for the VEBA project. VEBA now leverages an end-to-end VMware OSS stack by default, which also provides a strong architectural foundation for future product updates and innovations. We could not be more excited to share this release with our community 🥳 and below are just some of the key feature highlights.

Embedded Knative


Knative is a Kubernetes-based platform to deploy and manage modern serverless workloads. Support for Knative in VEBA was first introduced in our v0.5 release last December and only supported an external Knative deployment. With this latest release, VEBA now supports an embedded Knative deployment which includes the full Knative Serving and Eventing components which is automatically configured within VEBA.

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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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