VMware Aria was announced during this year’s VMware Explore US General Session, and it of course also featured sessions in VMware Explore EMEA. Time to recap what it is all about:

“VMware Aria is a multi-cloud management portfolio that provides a set of end-to-end solutions for managing the cost, performance, configuration, and delivery of infrastructure and cloud-native applications across any cloud.”

The brand title “Aria” was chosen to describe a piece for voice. That piece could be an instrumental accompaniment or be solo, and is usually part of a longer work, like an opera. Sing with one Voice.

The new Aria portfolio adds new solutions such as Aria Hub, Aria Guardrails, Aria Migration, and Aria Business Insight, but also consists of the former vRealize Suite products vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight, and vRealize Network Insight. It also adds vRealize True Visibility Suite and CloudHealth Secure State. Further, VMware Aria complements VMware Tanzu by including Tanzu Observability by Wavefront.

In a nutshell, the Aria portfolio consists of the following:

  • Aria Hub and Aria Graph
  • Aria Cost
  • Aria Operations
  • Aria Automation
  • Aria Guardrails
  • Aria Migration
  • Aria Business Insights

Additionally, VMware Skyline is included in the VMware Aria portfolio.

Aria Hub and Aria Graph

“The common platform and data store”

Formerly known as Project Ensemble, this is the new multi-cloud management central platform with integrations across the VMware Aria portfolio. VMware Aria Hub provides centralized views and controls to manage the entire multi-cloud environment.

VMware Aria Hub is powered by Aria Graph, which is a graph-based data store that captures the resources and relationships of a multi-cloud environment. Designed for the operational challenges of cloud-native applications and environments, Aria Graph provides a single source of truth that is updated in near-real time. The Aria Graph technology anchors all core VMware Aria multi-cloud management solutions, and it also powers a set of end-to-end multi-cloud management solutions. It has a public API which is using a GraphQL model.

It supports VMware clouds (private clouds, partner clouds, sovereign clouds, telco clouds, edge clouds) and public clouds like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.

VMware Aria Cost

“Delivers comprehensive visibility, optimization, and governance for cost and usage across clouds.“

Aria Cost (formerly, CloudHealth): simplifies financial management, streamlines operations, and improves cross-organizational collaboration across a multi-cloud environment.

VMware Aria Operations

“Provides full-stack visibility, troubleshooting, and insights and remediation for app and infra performance.”

  • Aria Operations (formerly, vRealize Operations)
  • Aria Operations for Logs (formerly, vRealize Log Insight)
  • Aria Operations for Networks (formerly, vRealize Network Insight)
  • Aria Operations for Applications (formerly, Tanzu Observability): provides a unified observability multi-cloud management solution with single-source-of-truth visibility and contextualized information across logs, metrics, and traces for greater business agility while maintaining SLAs. Observability provides answers as to why something is wrong and how to fix it.
  • Aria Operations for Integrations (formerly, vRealize True Visibility Suite): brings data depth and context to hybrid clouds, while offering the ability to monitor heterogenous environments.
  • Aria Operations for Secure Clouds (formerly, CloudHealth Secure State): visualizes how attackers move laterally by exploiting resource relationships, misconfigurations, & entitlements. Leverages real-time detection, machine learning, and automation to stay on top of critical cloud risks.

VMware Aria Automation

“Automates and configures app and infra deployment and enforce cost, security and performance best practices.”

Aria Automation (formerly, vRealize Automation): is a multi-cloud infrastructure automation platform with event-driven state management and compliance. It is designed to help organizations control and secure self-service clouds, multi-cloud automation with governance, and DevOps-based infrastructure delivery.

It consists of the following components:

  • Aria Automation Assembler (formerly, Cloud Assembly)
  • Aria Automation Consumption (formerly, VMware Service Broker)
  • Aria Automation Orchestrator (formerly, vRealize Orchestrator)
  • Aria Automation Pipelines (formerly, VMware Code Stream)
  • Aria Automation Config (formerly, vRealize Automation SaltStack Config)
  • Aria Automation for Secure Clouds (formerly, CloudHealth Secure State): visualizes how attackers move laterally by exploiting resource relationships, misconfigurations, & entitlements. Leverages real-time detection, machine learning, and automation to stay on top of critical cloud risks.

Three new overarching end-to-end solutions

These cut across the disciplines of cost, operations, and automation.

  • Aria Guardrails (formerly, vRealize Automation Cloud Guardrails): allows to setup environments across public clouds. It automates the enforcement of cloud guardrails for networking, security, cost, performance, and configuration at scale for multi-cloud environments with an everything-as-code approach.
  • Aria Migration: it allows organizations to discover their environment and to understand their application topology. That is to understand the costs through Aria Cost. Second, to understand performance and utilization through Aria Operations, and to optimize it to the correct footprint. Third, leveraging Aria Automation to create a pipeline to migrate the application to the correct environments and to set the right landing zones and cost policies in these environments.
  • Aria Business Insights: it is an intelligent event management capability of Aria Hub that leverages AI/ML to automatically organize symptoms across apps and infrastructure and determine actionable business insights.