Frequently Asked Questions

Find answers to the frequently asked questions about VMware Event Broker Appliance and Functions.

Common Questions - Appliance

1.

Can I connect to more than one vCenter per Appliance deployment?

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No. The Appliance is currently designed to support one vCenter as the event source. Customers that are familiar with deploying the components on Kubernetes can deploy multiple instances of the VMware Event Router container.

Note: It is possible though to run multiple instances of the event router with different configurations to address multi-vCenter scenarios.

2.

Can the default TLS certificates that are being used on the Appliance be updated?

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Yes! Follow the steps provided here.

3.

What happens if vCenter Server and VMware Event Broker connectivity is lost?

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VMware Event Router streams vCenter events as they get generated and being stateless, does not persist any event information. To provide a certain level of reliability, the following Event Delivery Guarantees exists:
- At-least-once event delivery semantics for the vCenter event provider by checkpointing the event stream into a file. In case of disconnection, the Event Router will replay all vCenter events of the last 10 minutes (10m reiteration) after a successful reconnection.
- At-least-once event delivery semantics are not guaranteed if the event router crashes within seconds right after startup and having received n events but before creating the first valid checkpoint (current checkpoint interval is 5s).

4.

How long does it take for the functions to be invoked upon an event being generated?

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Instantaneous to a few seconds! The function execution itself is not considered in this answer since that is dependent on the logic that is being implemented.

5.

Can I setup the VMware Event Broker Appliance components on Kubernetes?

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Yes! Follow the steps provided here.

6.

Can I use a private registry like e.g. Harbor to have a source of truth for my functions (images)?

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Yes! Follow the steps provided here.

7.

How can I monitor the Appliance, the Kubernetes components as well as the functions (pods) in terms of utilization, performance and state?

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vRealize Operations Manager provides these capabilities as described here.

Common Questions - Functions

1.

How do I obtain the Events in the function?

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Events are made available as stdin argument for the language that you are writing the function on. For example,
- In Powershell the event is made available using the $args variable as shown here $json = $args | ConvertFrom-Json
- In Python the event is made available with the req variable as shown here cevent = json.loads(req)

2.

How do I obtain the config file within the function?

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Configs are made available under /var/etc/config/<configname> within your container which you can read as a file within your function.

3.

Can I reuse secrets that was created for another function?

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Yes, if there is a config that you’d like different functions to share, create the secret and ensure your functions stack.yml references this secret.

Other

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How do I get support for VMware Event Broker Appliance?

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VMware Event Broker Appliance is a Fling. While it is not supported by GSS, if you find an issue, you can always open a bug on the Flings website or create an issue on our Github. Our team is very responsive and will offer assistance based on impact and availability.

Have more questions?