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VMware Cloud Enterprise Federation with AWS SSO

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Earlier this week I came to learn about a really cool enhancement that was just added to our VMware Cloud Services Console called Connector-less Self-Service Enterprise Federation Setup, it's a bit of a mouth full, but it basically makes configuring identity federation between the VMware Cloud Services Console and other third party identity provider extremely easy.

Identity federation is not a new feature in VMware Cloud and it has been supported for some time now, but it required customers to deploy the Workspace ONE Access connector into their on-premises environment for federating with either their local or third party identity provider. The new method that was introduced is "connector-less" because it does not require any additional infrastructure to be deployed and it also leverages SAML JIT (Just-in-Time) dynamic provisioning.


While looking at the some the pre-defined identity providers, I noticed that AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) was not listed and since we have customers that use both VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS services, this would certainly be a nice way to provide a common logon experience. Another benefit is also for customers using the new VMware Cloud with Tanzu services with Tanzu Mission Control (TMC), they can now easily manage secure access and provide their their end users the ability to provision and consume Tanzu Kubernetes Clusters (TKC) without the need of exposing them to the underlying infrastructure which is managed by the Cloud Administrators.

This was certainly a few good reasons to try out this new feature, especially as I have never worked with AWS SSO before.

Here is a quick video for those interested in the final logon experience when VMware Cloud is using AWS SSO as the identity provider:

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Quick demo videos of new VMware Cloud with Tanzu services

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VMware Cloud with Tanzu services is VMware's new managed Kubernetes offering that incorporates the vSphere with Tanzu technology delivered as a managed service as part of our VMware Cloud service offering. The initial release of Tanzu services is currently available on VMware Cloud on AWS, which will require SDDC version 1.16 and a request for enablement (contact your VMware account team) prior to deploying a new SDDC and enabling Tanzu services.

Note: In future, Tanzu services will also be enabled for existing SDDC (brownfield) as well as for other VMware Cloud Infrastructure Services, stay tuned!

Using Tanzu services with VMware Cloud is literally night and day when compared to installing and configuring vSphere with Tanzu yourself, which includes a number of other components to setup! As you would expect, as a service, it is simply a click of a button or API call and users only have to provide four basic input (technically three if you leave one of the recommended defaults) 🙂


Rather than talk about how the new Tanzu service works and some of the things you can do with the service right now, I figured I would record a few quick demo videos. You can find the Youtube playlist below if you wish to watch them all and I have also included a link to a Github repo for the demo examples that were used. Hope you enjoy!

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Automating the new VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) User Notification Preferences

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Last week the VMware Cloud team released one of the highly requested feature which is the ability to control notification preferences for an individual user, which is provided as part of the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) service. Users can now login to the VMware Cloud Console (VMC UI) and on left hand side, you should now see a new Notification Preferences tab which will allow you to specify which notifications you wish to receive via the Email channel.


As of writing this blog post, there is currently over 200+ notifications that can be configured which are broken up across the following four categories:

  • Elastic DRS (7)
  • Organization General (128)
  • SDDC Maintenance (61)
  • VMware Site Recovery Service (23)

Today, the notification preferences is configured on a per-use basis and by default, users are automatically subscribed to all notifications. The ability to customize is great but with over 200+ notifications to select or de-select from, this could be a difficult task, especially with a large number of users who may or may not understand each and ever single notification type. This is certainly an area the VMware Cloud team will be looking to enhance in the future to make it even easier to consume and customize.

In the mean time, to help with making this customization change easier within your organization, we can also take advantage of the new NGW Notification Preferences API. What better way to demonstrate this than incorporating this into my VMware Cloud Notification Gateway Community PowerShell Module, which is also available for consumption within the PowerShell Gallery.

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