Documentation

Deploy VMware Event Broker Appliance with OpenFaaS

Customers looking to seamlessly extend their vCenter by either deploying our prebuilt functions or writing your own functions can get started quickly by deploying VMware Event Broker Appliance with OpenFaaS as the Event Processor

Appliance Deployment Steps

Requirements

  • 2 vCPU and 8GB of memory for VMware Event Broker Appliance
  • vCenter Server 6.x or greater
  • Account to login to vCenter Server (readOnly is sufficient)

Step 1 - Download the VMware Event Broker Appliance (OVA) from the VMware Fling site.

Step 2 - Deploy the VMware Event Broker Appliance OVA to your vCenter Server using the vSphere HTML5 Client. As part of the deployment you will be prompted to provide the following input:

Networking (Required)

  • Hostname - The FQDN of the VMware Event Broker Appliance. If you do not have DNS in your environment, make sure the hostname provide is resolvable from your desktop which may require you to manually add a hosts entry. Proper DNS resolution is recommended
  • IP Address - The IP Address of the VMware Event Broker Appliance
  • Network Prefix - Network CIDR Selection (e.g. 24 = 255.255.255.0)
  • Gateway - The Network Gateway address
  • DNS - DNS Server(s) that will be able to resolve to external sites such as Github for initial configuration. If you have multiple DNS Servers, input needs to be space separated.
  • DNS Domain - The DNS domain of your network
  • NTP Server - NTP Server(s) for proper time synchronization. If you have multiple NTP Servers, input needs to be space separated.

Proxy Settings (Optional)

  • HTTP Proxy Server - HTTP Proxy Server followed by the port (e.g. http://proxy.provider.com:3128)
  • HTTPS Proxy - HTTPS Proxy Server followed by the port (e.g. http(s)://proxy.provider.com:3128)
  • Proxy Username - Optional Username for Proxy Server
  • Proxy Password - Optional Password for Proxy Server
  • No Proxy - Exclude internal domain suffix. Comma separated (localhost, 127.0.0.1, domain.local)

OS Credentials (Required)

  • Root Password - This is the OS root password for the VMware Event Broker Appliance
  • Enable SSH - Check the box to allow SSH to the Appliance (SSH to the appliance is disabled by default)

vSphere (Required)

  • vCenter Server - This FQDN or IP Address of your vCenter Server that you wish to associate this VMware Event Broker Appliance to for Event subscription
  • vCenter Username - The username to login to vCenter Server, as mentioned earlier, readOnly account is sufficient
  • vCenter Password - The password to the vCenter Username
  • Disable vCenter Server TLS Verification - If you have a self-signed SSL Certificate, you will need to check this box

Event Processor Configuration (Required)

  • Event Processor - Choose OpenFaaS (default)

OpenFaaS Configuration

  • Password - Password to login into OpenFaaS using “admin” account. Please use a secure password
  • Advanced Settings - N/A, future use

For more information on using the OpenFaaS and AWS EventBridge Processor, please take a look at the VMware Event Router documentation

zAdvanced (Optional)

  • Debugging - When enabled, this will output a more verbose log file that can be used to troubleshoot failed deployments
  • POD CIDR Network - Customize POD CIDR Network (Default 10.99.0.0/20). Must not overlap with the appliance IP address

Step 3 - Power On the VMware Event Broker Appliance after successful deployment. Depending on your external network connectivity, it can take a few minutes while the system is being setup. You can open the VM Console to view the progress. Once everything is completed, you should see an updated login banner for the various endpoints:

Appliance Status: https://[hostname]/status
Install Logs: https://[hostname]/bootstrap
Appliance Statistics: https://[hostname]/stats
OpenFaaS UI: https://[hostname]

NOTE: If you enable Debugging, the install logs endpoint will automatically contain the more verbose log entries.

Step 4 - You can verify that everything was deployed correctly by opening a web browser and accessing one of the endpoints along with the associated admin password you had specified as part of the OVA deployment.

Deploy a Function

At this point, you have successfully deployed the VMware Event Broker Appliance and you are ready to start deploying your functions!