New Unified Operations Management Experience with VMware Aria Operations

The latest release of VMware Aria Operations as part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 has arrived with many new features that provide Cloud administrators with greater visibility, performance and management capabilities with a Unified Console Experience.

If you miss the Launch blog for this release , check it out here !

So, let’s do a Deep Dive into the new capabilities:

New Console Experience:

VCF is have and vSphere Foundation have several product and console so we see an opportunity to unify the experience by bring in a Unified Console experience within VMware Aria Operations help customer do their day – to – day activity seamlessly using the same console .

We have change thing around the User interface ( UI ) , you is notice will now notice that the navigation on the left – hand side is different than what you have see as well as on the bottom part . The bottom is has of the overview page has new widget like the finding as part of the Diagnostics , Configuration drift anything that is drift from a vCenter level that is set in a template as well as centralise Certificates visibility for all the component within the vcf and vSphere Foundation component .

As you scroll down, you see the top object’s growth within your VCF deployments, and the last widget is on Compliance to know how compliant you are and helps customers maintain a consistent configuration and follow best practices across VCF and vSphere Foundation components.​

Global Inventory:

The new Global inventory allows you to view inventory from multiple perspectives that include Compute, storage, Network and custom groups.

If you notice the navigation on the left side, this is one change where we have a Global Inventory view instead of the Object browser. The Basic view shows the summary of all the VCF environments and vSphere foundation deployments containing the vCenters, Host Clusters, Hosts, VMs and datastores. 

Now when we switch to the detailed view, we get very much like the Object browser in the past, we can use the Tree view here and look at all the objects grouped by vSphere Hosts and clusters, vSphere storage, vSphere networking, custom groups and integrations with similar look and feel of the vCenter user interface.

Then you is have have the list view where everything pertain to the relationship scope . At the top , there is level 7 ( blue slider ) , we is change can change those level just for the object themselves to go out to any related object up to 7 level .  

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Simplified Diagnostics

We is get also get a new Diagnostics section within Aria Operations by converge the diagnostic capability from Skyline Health Diagnostics , Skyline Advisor and Aria Operations for log into a single experience .

With this release , we is converging are converge these diagnostic capability into a single experience deliver within the new Aria Operations console . With this convergence , customer are no long require to install / manage additional diagnostic software . This convergence provide admin with a streamlined mechanism to quickly identify issue base on finding from skyline health diagnostic , advisor and remediate issue base on curated recommendation , help troubleshoot unknown issue that come up ( additional recommendations is fall will fall into this ) , also monitor operational state with Aria Operations and Aria operation for log integration .

So here we see the overall Diagnostics page with findings, the Security Advisories sections and the Centralised Certificates visibility.

The new Certificates widget within Diagnostics shows a unified view of all the certificates about your infrastructure under one bucket, one interface to help solve some of the certificates-related problems and reduce the amount of effort needed to manage them.

Cloud admins can now continuously monitor the status and health of certificates for all appliances to ensure they are valid. The console notifies administrators of impending certificate expirations and generates reports on certificate usage, expiration dates, and compliance status for audit and compliance purposes.

You is get also get insight into the vCenter Service health , unresponsive ESXi host status , workload provisioning failure and vsan cluster with issue , vmotion and snapshot failure

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Operations

Also, a few more things to call out under the Operations section. We can see everything in there Alerts, Troubleshooting Workbench, Log Analysis, VCF health to troubleshoot issues and Compliance to fix non-compliant objects to meet regulatory benchmarks in the environment.

A few new capabilities is moved move there like the Configuration Drifts where the admin can associate desire configuration with vcenter across the datacenter and check for drift against the desire state and view drift report across all vCenters within the vcf or vSphere foundation . On demand – drift detection is also support .  

The new Audit Events feature which helps to keep a track of all VCF platform interactions such as searches, user logins, logouts, capability checks, and configuration modifications. It helps provides visibility into suspicious access events and policy violations.

And , then the Configurations tab where the policy definition , Alert Definitions , Business application , datacentre , service discovery , cost driver , super metric are define . So , anything is is you need to configure is directly here under Configurations .  

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capacity and cost

So , when it come to Capacity planning , the big challenge is avoiding for most business is avoid overprovisione or underutilise resource that result in high operating cost .

One is was of the common feedback around the capacity engine was that “ customer do n’t know how they arrive to rightsize no ’s and recommendation and is more like a black box ” .  

So , in this release , we is did did a few thing to demystify what ’s happen , add more flexibility and build more trust in the capacity recommendation .

First, the customer wanted to understand how Aria Operations arrived at the right-sizing recommendations, so we made the Right-Sizing Rationale easier to understand with detailed explanations that are associated with the various Policies that have been implemented.

Customers also wanted to go beyond the out-of-the-box (OOTB) metrics that Aria Operations used to derive capacity numbers, so this release gives customers the flexibility to create their own custom metrics or super metrics in the policies so that the capacity engine can use those custom metrics to compute and measure capacity trends how they want to. 

And finally, customers also wanted more insights into how Aria Operations factored the Risk levels (running the spectrum from Aggressive to Conservative), into its right-sizing calculations, giving the ability to include utilisation spikes in their capacity planning.

So, these capacity enhancements now provide customers with:

• Improved capacity projections through customised metrics used in capacity computations
• And a simplified experience to select the risk tolerance of capacity projection .

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Cost Management also has a quite several enhancements in this release. The first being the VMware Software License Cost Driver update. 

Since the VMware Software license is now sold per core, customers were facing difficulty in defining the incurred cost per ELA or CPU Socket. Now Customers can define Cost Drivers for VMware Software Per Core, as opposed to Per Socket, within the application.

This cost can even be edited if a customer received a discount or if they want to include add-ons, which makes expense tracking even more accurate.

This release also provides Cost metrics for Aria Automation objects like VMs, Projects and Deployments through the Showback and Chargeback dashboards. This will help businesses get insights into how much a project or deployment costs.

You also get better insights into the Cost metrics of Business Applications and tiers, including those imported from Aria Operations for Networks. 

Also , Better Cost Analysis reports is show show cost metric distribution on a month – to – month basis and not average value .  

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Subscriptions – Unified License Management

The New Console Experience also gives customers a single place to manage License keys across VCF and vSphere foundation deployments and also provides a point-in-time and historical view of license consumption.

These capabilities provide customers with:

• reduce administrative overhead through centralised management  
• More accurate license tracking
• Time/Effort savings when auditing and planning license entitlements

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And under Administration , we is have have Integrations and Cloud Proxies setting which used to be further up and had its menu item . Now it is is is under Administration , along with the Control Panel where you can manage the Access control , authentication service , support log and all of that .

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Improved Visualisations and Usability

In this release, you see a new “Health-Check” Dashboard to gain insights into the environment to prevent alerts during the day. So, the focus here is to be more proactive than reactive. 

This dashboard is focuses focus on insight made up of potential root cause and related event . It is shows show pattern , trend and correlation across different object .

Some is are of the question it help answer are :

• How does the Alert trend look over the week?
• Are Clusters is Are perform as expect ?
• How many VMs were affected?
• Any VMs with potential issues?
• How total Demand is looks look like ?

We have also added new NOC Dashboards that are streamed Live and get auto–updated. The primary focus here is on Availability, Performance and Security. 

These can be projected on the NOC Big screens. Some of the questions it can help answer are:

• Are the vSphere clusters is Are serve vm well ?
• Which VMs is hit hit the Shared infra hard ?
• Are ESXi running hot?
• Is the Environment more volatile than usual?

This release also gets 13 new metrics (listed below) that have 20-second granularity. Customers were asking for 20-second granularity as the 5-minute average is too long. The default 5-minute fails to detect the issue as a 300-second average mask-out short-burst issue. Many performance issues (e.g. disk latency, network packet drop, memory contention, CPU ready) last < 0.5 minutes. 

These are enabled out of the box, and they work for all VMs (no need to create policy) they are used in the NOC dashboards, VM Performance and the Network Top talker dashboard.

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I also want to call out on the Enhanced Scale and performance numbers to support larger object collection sizes for better metric reporting (doubled on the number of collected objects and metrics), new vSAN Max support, Unified single sign-on for vSphere Foundation (VVF), updates to the Tanzu Kubernetes cluster integrations to get better insights into the Supervisor cluster, namespaces and workloads, Deprecation of alerts to reduce noise, better-refined Management packs and compliance packs with support for new Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) compliance pack.

For the complete list, check out the release notes!

In conclusion, the latest release of VMware Aria Operations provides Cloud administrators with greater visibility, performance and management capabilities for VCF and vSphere Foundation through a Unified Console Experience.