Authored by Sachin Alex, Product Marketing Manager, VMware
VMware Explore 2023 is here and in this blog post, I will be mentioning some of the important VMware Aria Operations features and capabilities that will be announced at VMware Explore.
These capabilities will help maintain compliance and reduce risk, better understand the health of VCF management applications, and provide sustainability green scores for the entire organization.
The features apply to multi cloud pillar, VMware Cloud pillar and Platform & Usability.
New Features in Multi Cloud:
- Cloud Editions Integration for VMware Aria Operations and VMware Aria Operations for Logs
VMware is introducing Cloud Editions to help achieve faster time to market and streamline maintenance windows, improve global security and inventory visibility. Operations are simplified to enable quick repeatable deployments, reduce risk with observability, actionable insights and performance optimization. Our customers can reduce TCO for on-prem deployments with higher infrastructure utilization and automated life cycle management, and future-proof infrastructure with hybrid cloud services including protection for any workload with VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. VMware Aria Operations is part of Essentials, Standard and Pro Cloud Editions as VMware Aria Universal Suite along with flavors of vSphere and vSAN.
2. Management Pack as a Service
With so many endpoints available, there are instances where there is no Management Pack provided by either VMware or the respective vendor. Instead of waiting for the VMware release cycle for the integration to be provided, the customers will have the ability to create management packs, if the endpoints are REST- API compliant, using a no-code platform.
Customers can define the objects and their relationships along with the metrics and properties to be monitored.
Figure 1. VMware Aria Operations Management Pack Builder
VMware Cloud:
Sustainability
Sustainability is a priority for most organizations. VMware helps customers in achieving their Green Goals by reducing carbon emissions and energy costs.
In the VMware Aria Operations 8.6 release, the first Sustainability Dashboards were introduced focusing on identifying idle workloads to optimize your carbon footprint and showing the benefits of virtualization in carbon emission savings.
In a later release, the Green Score was introduced which helped organizations track their sustainability journey. The Green Score was calculated for an organization based on five basic parameters- Workload Efficiency, Utilization of Physical resources, Virtualization rate, Power source and Hardware efficiency.
In the upcoming release, in addition to monitoring the Green Score at an organization level, customers will be able to calculate Green Scores for individual data centers thus helping them identify which data center resources need optimization and help with further reduction in carbon emissions and save on costs.
Unified Compliance for VMware Cloud:
Organizations want to secure their infrastructure with the optimum configurations and control. Compliance packs help them adhere to VMware security best practices as given in the VMware Security configuration guides and other important industry specific regulatory benchmarks.
Figure 2. Unified Compliance View
With the upcoming release, customers will be able to view the details of compliance assessment and the affected objects. Compliance scores indicate the current compliance percentage of the cloud environment. Score cards in the Compliance tab on the landing page display the number of non-compliant objects versus the total number of objects assessed for a particular benchmark. Users can also view the object breakdown and understand the various objects by object type and view or provide reporting compliance misconfigurations. Furthermore, the associated alerts list displays the list of non-compliant objects violating one or more compliance benchmarks.
Simplified VCF Experience:
VMware is constantly striving to provide a simplified user experience be it through the introduction of the Launchpad, easy onboarding of cloud accounts or the workflow-based approach to focus on the different pillars of operations (Cost, Compliance, Sustainability, Capacity and Performance)
VCF Operations is another use-case that VMware is trying to simplify. It was introduced as part of the Launchpad in an earlier edition.
As part of the upcoming release, users will be able to monitor the health of VCF Management applications across five dimensions:
- Application Reachability
- Service Health
- Appliance (VM) Availability
- Password Status
- Certificate Status
Figure 3. VMware Cloud Foundation enhancements.
Platform & Usability:
- Chargeback Integration into VMware Aria Operations for VCPP
Chargeback formerly known as the Tenant app was a standalone product which worked in conjunction with VMware Aria operations and vCloud Director.
With the upcoming release, Chargeback would be integrated into VMware Aria Operations. This would enable the Cloud providers to chargeback their Tenants and create a bill based on their usage. They would be able to see Alerts, reports and some basic capacity details.
2. AI-based alert clustering
Figure 4. AI-Based alert clustering.
VMware Aria Operations displays unified alerts across VMware and 3rd Party products. With an increasing number of integrations that are readily available, the volume of alerts has gone up tremendously.
In order to improve the ease of consumption of these alerts, we have introduced a new feature that is called AI-based intelligent alert clustering.
With the best-in-class object relationship mapping, grouping of various alerts can be done based on related objects. This will help narrow down the alerts and help to reduce the overall number of alerts. There is also a timeline option, where we can playback the original alert and check what triggered it, further helping to reduce the overall MTTR.
3. VMware Aria content in VMware Marketplace
The VMware Marketplace will have a new VMware Aria content section that contains all cloud and on-prem links to content from VMware Aria Operations, VMware Aria Operations for Applications, and VMware Aria Operations for Logs platforms. It will give a single pane of glass to view the content for these products and allow for download or direct launch into the cloud instances where the content can be enabled and configured.
4. Enhanced Cloud Proxy scalability
As customer VCF environments are becoming larger in size, platform modernization is a key objective that customers are trying to achieve. With modernization comes the challenge to scale. With the upcoming release, VMware Aria Operations will be able to support over a thousand cloud proxies for a given cluster and be able to monitor more than double the current number of metrics and objects that are supported on any given size of a cluster.
Looking for more?
This blog is a highlight of the features releasing this quarter. For full details on this exciting new release, be sure to check out the release notes. If you want to learn more about how VMware Aria Operations can help you and your organization then head over to VMware Tech Zone. Request a trial of VMware Aria Operations, engage in a VMware Aria Operations Cloud hands on lab, or request a conversation with one of our experts today.
