The VMware Explore 2023 event in Barcelona took place from Nov. 6-9. In this blog post, I’m going to summarize recent developments and announcements from Explore Barcelona in the multi-cloud management area with focus on the Aria portfolio.

Some significant changes in the Aria and Tanzu portfolio have been taken place during the last months, i.e. VMware moved AIOps, FinOps and IT automation products from the Aria portfolio into Tanzu. VMware has rebranded four Aria products as Tanzu Intelligence Services and Tanzu Hub, which are now positioned alongside the existing Tanzu Application Platform (TAP).

In a nutshell: VMware Tanzu will be the multi-cloud application brand that accelerates application delivery with key capabilities to develop, operate, and optimize (D-O-O framework) applications on any cloud. VMware Aria will continue to provide cloud management capabilities and specifically be a critical solution in helping VMware customers to transform their physical computing resources into a true IaaS surface, but will no longer be part of the DOO narrative.

The first part of the post will explain the current multi-cloud app strategy and how the Aria and Tanzu portfolios fit in there.

The second part will summarise the recent developments and announcements within the Aria portfolio.

VMware’s current narrative on multi-cloud management

Software agility drives business agility and an organization’s ability to deliver new applications and functionality more frequently is what separates it from the competition. Accelerating application delivery means the ability to develop, operate, and optimize applications on any cloud. This app strategy the implementation of a multi-cloud operating model that is proactive and effective.

In the data center, infrastructure and operations teams have to provide an IaaS layer by adding virtualization and cloud management software to the physical infrastructure. Here, VMware customers are called the cloud builders (1a), while in the public cloud they are cloud consumers (1b). VMware’s Aria Universal Suite offerings deliver the management solutions that help to transform compute, storage, and networking resources into a true IaaS cloud surface. Through Aria Universal Suite cloud builders can turn vSphere and VMware Cloud environments into private and hybrid clouds delivering a true cloud experience. Aria Universal Suite is made available as an integral part of VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Cloud Editions (formerly Cloud Packs). Aria Universal Suite comprises of:

  • Aria Automation
  • Aria Operations
  • Aria Operations for Logs
  • Aria Operations for Networks

On top of this cloud infrastructure, platform teams provide CaaS and PaaS services to their developers to build and deploy applications. The platform teams build, maintain, and operate key capabilities like open source or data content, Kubernetes clusters, pipelines, and software security, and keep them compliant to corporate policies for the developers. The VMware Tanzu offerings deliver this build platform (2) with key capabilities such as a developer portal and secure supply supply chains as well as the K8s runtime and management tools needed to run modern applications in production.

Operations teams then need to understand how these running apps are behaving over time and need the ability to continuously improve them. To do that, they need visibility into the applications, infrastructure, and all the services used – to pinpoint issues, find opportunities for tuning, and more. Here, Tanzu Intelligence Services provide the capabilities to manage applications and workloads (3) deployed on any cloud and Kubernetes distribution. Tanzu Intelligence Services comprise of:

  • VMware Tanzu CloudHealth (formerly VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth)
  • VMware Tanzu Guardrails (formerly VMware Aria Guardrails)
  • VMware Tanzu Transformer (formerly VMware Aria Migration)
  • VMware Tanzu Insights (formerly VMware Aria Insights)

Finally, Tanzu Hub (formerly Aria Hub) is designed to be the central point of integration across both the Tanzu and Aria product portfolios, providing visibility and context at both the application and infrastructure level across all clouds (private, public, hybrid and edge).

Aria Automation – What’s new

Let’s have a look on recent developments in Aria Automation.

Scalable support for new resources

Continuous, scalable support for new resources using plugin-based architecture

Native Resource Support

  • New resources including associated properties and day-2 actions can be natively supported by Aria Automation using Idem technology
  • Resources continue to be managed with core capabilities including policies, allocation logic, and extensibility

Out-Of-Band Updates

  • Plugins will be continuously updated and available in public repositories
  • Plugins can be updated independent of Aria Automation monthly releases

Custom Plugins (potential future feature)

  • Customers and partners can create and upload their own plugins to instantly consume and manage custom resources through Aria Automation

Integration with Native Public Cloud Resources

Resource Support

  • Cloud resources are made available with all available properties and day-2 actions

Allocation Helpers

  • Allocation is now decoupled from Idem resources
  • Serve as a bridge between resources and your zoned and profiled infrastructure
  • Provide placement logic for cloud resources
    • Compute, Storage, Network, Security Group, Images, Flavors, Custom Naming

Native Integration with NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Tech Preview)

Load Balancer as a Service (LBaaS)

  • Provide LBaaS through Aria Automation’s IaC and governance capabilities

End-to-end application provisioning

  • OOTB integration between NSX ALB and Aria Automation
  • Combine Aria Automation’s vSphere / NSX workload and network automation
  • Leverage Idem technology for rapid innovation and desired state enforcement

Developer-ready platform with Cloud Consumption Interface

  • Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) Initial Availability for all vSphere+ customers
    • Single interface powered by Aria Automation with services aggregated from multiple supervisor clusters
    • Choice of Kubernetes CLI, API and UI across VMware-based cloud infrastructure
  • Enables
    • Admins to provide governance
    • DevOps to discover and consume services

Aria Operations – What’s new

The recent developments in Aria Operations are around the following areas:

  • Optimized monitoring capabilities for all VMware clouds, private and public
  • Ease of use: streamlining of UI for easier handling of the product
  • Deep integration for monitoring of applications, physical, virtual and container infrastructure
  • Content enhancements

Launchpad navigation

Launchpad introduces a workflow-based approach to focus on the different pillars of operations (cost, compliance, sustainability, capacity and performance).

Launchpad replaces the existing Quick Start Page.

Aria Operations Content Builder (formerly Management Pack Builder)

Build and deploy solutions in a no-code environment. Gives us the power to expand our monitoring landscape to fit our unique requirements in hours instead of weeks or months
Feature coming to SaaS, supporting

  • Aria Operations
  • Aria Operations for Logs
  • Aria Operations for Applications

Sustainable operations

Sustainability Dashboards focusing on identifying idle workloads to optimize the carbon footprint
Introduction of so-called Green Score, which helps organizations to track their sustainability . It is calculated based on five basic parameters, i.e. workload efficiency, utilization of physical resources, virtualization rate, power source and hardware efficiency.

VCF Compliance

Compliance Pack based on the following VCF audit guides:

  • VCF 4.2
  • VCF 4.3
  • VCF 4.4

Evaluate, Assess, and Secure VCF environments across ESXi, SDDC Manager, vCenter Server, vSAN, and NSX.

Integration with NSX Manager / NSX Dashboards

Single pane of glass for all NSX-T alerts
New OOTB NSX Dashboards, semlessly integrated into the LaunchPad

  • Categorized as inventory and performance dashboards

Application monitoring with Telegraf of vSphere and non-vSphere endpoints

Extend product-managed Telegraf to allow UI-based plug-in enablement for the new Endpoint object type (physical servers and remote objects)

  • Deprecate new installation of user-managed agent

Benefit

  • Monitor endpoints that you don’t have full access to and that no Internet access
  • Accelerate migration from EpOps to Telegraf
  • Consolidate all monitored objects and agents in one place

Configure Telegraf content at scale

  • Bulk configuration of product-managed Telegraf
  • Support for activating Discovered services and Custom Monitoring

Benefit

  • Configure monitoring for multiple workloads at once
  • Accelerate migration from EpOps to Telegraf
  • Less time-consuming and less error prone

Aria Operations for Logs – What’s new

VMware Aria Operations for Logs introduced new capabilities for logging for VMware Cloud Foundation and the 3rd party ecosystem across on-premises and SaaS to help manage log data at scale with deep operational visibility, intelligent analytics for troubleshooting, and auditing across multi-cloud environments.

Federated Log Management

Provides an unified experience for managing logs across On-prem and Cloud.

Allows for easier troubleshooting and knowledge to know where to deep-dive. Allows GDPR compliance where data is kept in the location where it is collected.

Compliance

  • Scheduled Reports
  • Usage Reports

Platform & Usability

  • User experience enhancements (option to tune user session timeout and set time zone) for easier troubleshooting
  • Ingestion Limit Notifications
  • Public APIs (SaaS)
  • Content Packs (Apache Web Service, VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator)
  • Support for AVI load balancer for platform use

Aria Operations for Networks – What’s new

New capabilities to simplify network visibility with the 6.11 release:

  • Hybrid Cloud Network Visibility (Beta) for traffic visibility for AWS PaaS Services and network connectivity for AWS Direct Connect and Transit Gateway (TGW)
  • VMware Aria Operations for Networks with Intelligent Assist (Tech Preview) allows for AI-based natural language network and traffic-aware search queries
  • Network Insights with AI-based Root Cause Analysis (RCA) (Beta) AI-based multi-level causal analysis leveraging the Network Graph and anomalies; draws out app-aware network and traffic dependencies while correlating with AI/ML-generated anomalies and insights

Intelligent Assist for Search (GenAI/LLM)

AI search with Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable effortless resolution of network and traffic-related issues through natural language queries.

Three core use cases:

  • Search Conversation: Simplified user queries using natural language leveraging GenAI
  • Product Awareness: e.g. ask “What’s new in version 6.11” will result in relevant excerpts from release notes
  • Repeatable Tasks: e.g. type “Repeat this” and GenAI automatically executes task again

References

For everybody who wants to get more information about Aria and what’s new, I’ll be presenting this in more depth at the VMware vUpdate Austria 2023 event series from 28.11 to 30.11 in Linz, Wien, and Graz.