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VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) v0.8.0

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I am very excited to share that we have just released our long awaited v0.8.0 of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)! 🥳


The v0.8.0 release has been in the works for quite some time and because of the major architectural change in migrating to the VMware Tanzu Sources for Knative, we also needed to update all example functions to reflect the new event payload schema, refresh all user documentation and our VEBA website, which only performed during our spare cycles and typically in the evenings!

It has certainly been a long journey and I could not have done it without my colleague Robert Guske, who has been a machine in updating all of our documentation to make it easier to consume for both our existing and new users. 🙌

Last but now least, I want to give a huge thanks 👏 to my original partner in crime Michael Gasch, while he is no longer with VMware, he was still kind enough to help answer some questions while hitting some release automation issue over the weekend and was instrumental in helping me get the v0.8.0 release out!

Changelog for VEBA v0.8.0:

  • Updated Software Build-of-Material (SBOM) (See the VEBA BOM for detailed changes)
  • Replaced VMware Event Router with VMware Tanzu Sources for Knative
  • All VEBA endpoints now protected with basic authentication
  • New Google Chat notification function
  • Migrated function container images from Google (GCR) to Github (GHCR)
  • Updated all PowerShell/PowerCLI functions with the latest PS/PCLI base images
  • Improved website documentation
  • Various Bug Fixes and Code Improvement

Download for VEBA v0.8.0: 

NSX Alarms in vCenter Server using vSphere Events in vSphere 8

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I recently learned about a really cool capability that is part of the NSX Easy Install feature that was initially introduced back in vSphere 7.0 Update 3, allowing administrators to easily deploy, configure and manage NSX directly from vCenter Server using the vSphere UI.

Here is a demo of this feature in action by fellow VMware colleague Vladimir Velikov, one of the Engineers who worked on the initial integration:

While reviewing the latest NSX 4.0.1.1 release notes, which adds support for vSphere 8 and DPU-based offloading, I found this little nugget at the very end of the What's New section under NSX vSphere UI Integration which states:

NSX Events Integrated in vCenter

🤩 whoa, the possibilities of this integration is immense, especially from an automation and event-driven standpoint ... In fact, this is something VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) users have been asking for, a way to tap into the rich Alarms and Events provided by NSX, similiar to what vCenter Server provides out of the box with over 2000+ events.

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Heads Up - Potential missing vCenter Server Events due to sequence ID overflow

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We had a few users who had reported issues with using the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution where VEBA was not receiving any events from the connected vCenter Server. This was really puzzling for the team to debug because the user clearly saw events in both the vSphere UI as well as using vSphere Automation Clients like PowerCLI.

After a bit of debugging with a few of our users (huge thanks to Michael Gasch for driving this), we discovered that in certain environments, the generated sequence number that is used for the vCenter Event ID has overflowed and causes the value to have a negative number. To further complicate the debugging, there are actually two ways of fetching vCenter Server Events using the vSphere API. The first is to just look at the LatestPage property, which will return the most recent events and not care about event ID and the second is to use CreateCollectorForEvents() which is more of an event stream and it does care about the event ID being non-negative. You can probably guess which vSphere API VEBA was using, not only because of our check-pointing feature but LatestPage could lose events from a client request point of view for chatty environments.

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