Hello everyone! It is great to have you back here! We can’t wait to unveil the new features and enhancements we’re rolling out in October. The updates include several enhancements for day 2 actions, new support for network automation experience, an easier process to onboard VMs in bulk, and many more. We hope you find them to elevate your end-to-end VMware Aria Automation experience.
Let’s start with enhancements on day 2 actions.
Support deployment-related property conditions for custom day 2 actions
Initially, custom actions supported advanced property-based conditions at the resource level, and now customers can define custom actions at the deployment level. This enhancement provides more flexibility and more choice for Cloud Admins to configure custom actions based on deployment-related criteria.
Unregister day 2 action is now available for vSphere virtual machines in a “missing” state.
Unregistering missing VMs is a critical component of the ‘Unregister’ overall functionality. Customers can now quickly recover and clean up missing deployments as part of Migrations without concern.
Furthermore, we aim to improve your network experience within VMware Aria Automation.
Support IPv6 for VMware Aria Automation provisioned workloads with external IPAM.
This feature introduces support for assigning IPv6 to single and dual-stacked workloads provisioned by VMware Aria Automation where the IPv6 address is requested via VMware Aria Automation’s integration with external IPAM system. This enhancement provides more choice and flexibility while customers are using external IPAM.
When allocating network for VM or LB VIP, VMware Aria Automation considers finding free IP address space across the set of all IP ranges within the network profile.
When allocating a network from within a network profile containing multiple networks, we will now consider the free IP address space across the set of IP ranges within the network to avoid choosing a network on which provisioning cannot succeed. This feature can avoid failure and make the provision success rate higher.
And we add more updates to improve bulk VMs on-boarding, naming and tag management experience, etc., on VMware Cloud.
Quick bulk onboard VMs from the Virtual Machines page.
Cloud Admins can now select multiple discovered VMs and onboard them in bulk into VMware Aria Automation management. This enhancement provides ease of use to cloud admins to quickly and easily onboard VMs.
Update image mappings in bulk across cloud accounts.
Customers can now update image mappings in bulk by managing all image mappings across cloud accounts/regions simultaneously. This enhancement provides an easier image mapping experience at scale across cloud accounts.
Disks added through VMware Aria Automation follow the naming convention followed by vSphere for naming consistency.
When a VM is created by VMware Aria Automation with multiple disks on vSphere, the convention is that the name of the VMDK on the filesystem will be the VM name plus an incrementing digit.
Improved tag management through API and user interface.
Users are now able to delete tags if they are not in use by being able to retrieve tag usage information. In the VMware Aria Automation console, users are now able to see all origins of tags, allowing easier tag management.
Support vCenter Hosts/clusters in maintenance mode.
VMware Aria Automation can now detect the ESxi Host state when it’s placed in maintenance mode. Hosts in maintenance mode will be skipped for provisioning until the host is removed from maintenance mode and VMware Aria Automation resource enumeration has been completed. This enhancement can efficiently avoid deployment failures and provide a smoother user experience.
Extensibility events are available for approval workflows.
New event topics are now available for approval events during the approval workflow in accordance with an approval policy. This enhancement gives users more flexibility to trigger extensibility actions or VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator workflows.
VMware Aria Automation on-premises now has a unified services tile similar and consistent with VMware Aria Automation, SaaS: “Aria Automation.”
Depending on the user service role, you will see “Assembler”, “Service Broker”, “Pipelines,” and “Orchestrator”, etc., as a family of services under “Aria Automation.” This new service switcher enables quick and easy navigation among services under VMware Aria Automation.
Deprecation notice for VMware Aria Automation extensibility action runtimes.
Extensibility actions are introducing new runtimes starting with the current release. Old runtimes are considered deprecated immediately and will be supported for a grace period. The last grace period is expected to end around the January release, after which old runtimes will be removed, and extensibility actions will default to the new runtimes.
The following is a list of the deprecated runtimes:
AWS:
Python 3.7
Node.js 14
Azure:
Python 3.8
Node.js 12
On-premises:
Python 3.7
Node.js 14
Powershell 7.1.7
For more information about VMware Aria Automation October 2023 / 8.14.0 release, please check out these additional resources:
For a full list of updates, visit our release notes page
Also, visit us online at VMware Aria Automation and check out these additional resources.
Learn about VMware Aria Automation features on TechZone
VMware Aria Automation for Dummies Guide
The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation, Q1 2023 Report
IDC Spotlight on Infrastructure as Code Report
451 Research Report – The Public Cloud Governance Imperative Report
Transform your IT with Self-Service Delivery Report
DevOps for Dummies Guide
Enterprise Framework for Network Automation eBook
Follow us on Twitter @VMwareAriaAuto
