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Using vCenter Converter 6.3 with vSphere 8 or VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A)

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Since the announcement that vCenter Converter was re-returning, customers have been looking forward to the day that vCenter Converter would be an officially supported product again. Luckily, folks did not have to wait long from the early beta almost a month ago and just a couple of days ago, vCenter Converter 6.3 has officially GA'ed!

The goal of this initial vCenter Converter release was to bring functional parity with the last supported release, updated development and security practices and a few minor enhancements including some new Guest Operating Systems and vSphere 7.0 support. The team still has a ton in store for subsequent releases and if there are certain features you really want to see, feel free to leave a comment and I will be sure to share it with PM/Engr team.

With that said, I have also been getting a lot of questions from customers interested in using Converter to migrate workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A), especially as they think about modernizing and consolidating their Datacenter infrastructure. While, VMware Cloud on AWS as a destination will be in scope for the next release, I was curious on whether it would work given that vSphere 7.0 support was added to latest vCenter Converter release.

You know what happens when I get curious ... I just have to try it out! 😅

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vSphere Event-Driven Automation using VMware Event Router on VMware Cloud on AWS with Knative or AWS EventBridge

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The VMware Event Broker Application (VEBA) is a popular VMware Event-Driven Automation solution that can be consumed using either the open source or commercial offering from VMware. The commercial offering of VEBA is already available to customers today via our Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) offering, which I have previously written about here. The open source offering of VEBA can be consumed in either a pre-packaged Virtual Appliance or a native Kubernetes Application called for those with an existing Kubernetes cluster.

Deploying the VEBA Virtual Appliance is well documented (here and here) and I wanted to spend some time covering the native Kubernetes deployment model, as it there are actually a couple of options and most recently, this came up in a customer discussions as they were interested in forwarding vSphere Events from VEBA to AWS EventBridge.

In the open source version of VEBA, there is a component called the VMware Event Router, which is responsible for connecting to an event source such as vCenter Server and then forwarding those events to a processor which can either be a a function that you have written to react to a specific event using Knative or to AWS EventBridge to integrate with other AWS native services like CloudWatch as an example.

To demonstrate the two different ways to deploy the VMware Event Router, I have created the following Github repo https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-event-driven-automation-vmware-event-router that provides an example to easily deploy the VMware Event Router to an existing Kubernetes cluster. For my environment, I will be using VMware Cloud on AWS and the managed Kubernetes offering called Tanzu services, which is included as part of the base offering and there is no additional cost of running the Kubernetes infrastructure, which is certainly an added bonus 😀

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Using Terraform to activate Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service on VMware Cloud on AWS

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It has been awhile since I have played with Terraform and I was recently investigating on whether I could use Terraform to automate the activation of the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) Service on a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC, which is a part of VMware's new managed Kubernetes offering called VMware Cloud with Tanzu services. Although there is an existing VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A) Terraform provider, it currently does not support configuring or managing the TKG Service.

Today, customers can automate VMware Cloud with Tanzu services with a simple REST API and with that in mind, I was curious if calling into a REST API using Terraform was even a thing? While searching online, I not only came to find out that directly calling a REST API using Terraform was a thing but that there were actually a few Terraform providers that enabled this capability. The most popular being Mastercard's Restapi Terraform provider, which was also updated just a couple of weeks ago.

I ended up learning a ton more about Terraform through this exercise and the final solution has been contributed to Ryan Johnson's amazing VMware Terraform Examples repo. I also have to give a huge shoutout to Ryan, who I consider one of the experts in the community for all things VMware and Terraform! I was also able to bounce some ideas and also learn a few new tricks in one of our recent conversations. 

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