VMware Event Broker Appliance – Part III – Tags and Clones (OpenFaas)

In Part I of this series, we explored how to deploy the VEBA appliance. In Part II, we looked at setting up a Windows workstation with the prereqs for interacting with VEBA. Part III focuses on working with vCenter tags and cloning a repository. The sample function will cause a vCenter tag to be applied to a VM when the VM powers on. At the end of Part III, you should have a vCenter tag defined, the tag’s URN, and a copy of the sample code from Github.

If you don’t want to learn about govmomi, you do not need to learn it for the code sample to work. You can create a tag named anything you like in the vCenter GUI. You can then use the get-tag PowerCLI cmdlet to retrieve the needed tag URN for the function.

In the getting started documentation, the Categories and tags section tells us to set 2 environment variables:

export GOVC_INSECURE=true
export GOVC_URL=’https://vcuser:vcpassword@vcenter.ip’

I set them to match my environment

govc tags.ls will list out all of the tags defined in your vCenter. If you have a brand new lab vCenter, this command will return nothing – but it should also not error out. For my lab, it shows the only tag that I have defined: alert-power-operations

I confirm the command was accurate by looking at the Tags & Custom Attributes area of vCenter

A few things about govc – you can invoke help to list all available operations – this is just one page of results

You can also show help on a specific command.

Note that this help dynamically reads environment variables – my lab’s vCenter is showing up as GOVC_URL in this help output.

The VEBA documentation says to take note of the tag’s URN when you create it with govc. We can use the tags.info command to get the URN of an existing tag without having to create it using govc.

You can retrieve the same information from PowerCLI if you’re more familiar with it – you don’t even need to use govc

Next, we need to clone the sample repository. There will be more on git later in this series, but for now you just need to be able to clone a repository and use a text editor.

I create an empty git folder, right-click inside of the folder and choose Git Bash here. 

The documentation says to run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/vmware-samples/vcenter-event-broker-appliance
cd vcenter-event-broker-appliance/examples/python/tagging

Git clone creates a copy of the VEBA sample code repository on your local system. Note that I passed a folder argument in the git clone command. By default, git would have created a folder called vcenter-event-broker-appliance and cloned the code inside of it. But I already have 2 copies of the repository for various testing reasons. I pass the clone command a folder argument of vcenter-event-broker-appliance3. Git clones the code for me and I CD to the new directory

The code is now downloaded to my laptop. In Part IV, we will customize the code for my lab environment and deploy the sample function to the VEBA appliance