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. During the deployment of the VMware Event Broker Appliance to vSphere, only one vSphere source and one Horizon source can be configured at a time.

Note: It is possible though to run multiple instances of a source (e.g. VSphereSource) with different configurations to address multi-vCenter scenarios. This decision was made for scalability and resource/tenancy isolation purposes.

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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A configured VMware Tanzu Source 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 5 minutes (5m reiteration) after a successful reconnection.
- At-least-once event delivery semantics are not guaranteed if the source-adapter (pod) crashes within seconds right after startup and having received n events but before creating the first valid checkpoint (current checkpoint interval is 10s).

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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VMware Aria Operations 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

1.

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.

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