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New vCenter Events for vSphere 7.0 Update 3

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With the release of vSphere (7.0 Update 3), brings new vCenter Server Events which can immediately benefit users of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA), especially with the latest VEBA v0.7 release!

In vSphere 7.0 Update 2, there was a total of 1,861 events in a default installation of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and with vSphere 7.0 Update 3, there is now a total of 1,926 events. An increase of 65 new events which spans the recently released Data Persistent Platform (DPp), VM Encryption, TLS Trust Management, vSAN and many others.

Below is a summarized view of the 65 new vCenter Server Events, for more details including descriptions, please refer to my vCenter Event Mapping Github Repo

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What's new in VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) v0.7

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The VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) team is excited to announce the availability of the highly anticipated VEBA v0.7 release! This is by far our largest release to date with the number of new features and functionality that has been added by our contributors. This has really been the result of closely collaborating and listening to the feedback provided by our VEBA users and community and helping drive our overall roadmap.

For those wishing to learn more about VEBA and the new v0.7 release, I did want to mention the following two VMworld 2021 sessions that may be of interests:

Without further ado, let's dive right into the new features!

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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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