What's New for VMware Aria Operations for Networks at VMware Explore Las Vegas

Earlier this week, on Tuesday, August 22, 2023, during the Solution Keynote session, Accelerate Application Delivery for Continuous Innovation, VMware’s SVP and GM, Purnima Padmanabhan, showed a slide with highlights from VMware Aria, including the VMware Aria Operations for Networks with Intelligent Assist (Network LLM search) and Network Insights with AI-based Root Cause Analysis (Guided Troubleshooting) (Figure 1)

World-class companies release their applications faster than everyone else. A company’s infrastructure needs to keep up. The VMware Aria Operations for Networks solution helps run the fast delivery of applications on top of the network infrastructure. A previous blog explained many expected activities during this week’s busy VMware Explore in Las Vegas.

At VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas, we introduced several new capabilities to help customers with vSphere, NSX+, VMware HCX, and other infrastructure plus discussed the latest features in the 6.11 and SaaS release also on this technical 6.11 blog.

Session

Figure 2. The speakers for the breakout session MAPB2503LV: A Customer’s View on What’s New with VMware Aria Operations for Networks. From left to right: VMware Sr. Director Product Management Sesh Sayani, VMware Staff Technical Marketing Architect Matt Just, Denver Health and Hospital Authority Systems Administrator/Analyst Erik Warnken, VMware Group Product Line Manager Pravin Goyal, VMware Sr. Manager Product Management Ray Belleville

The session covered the broad use cases available in VMware Aria Operations for Networks, the latest capabilities discussed in the blog, and how customer Denver Health has used the solution.

A customer case study is available with the customer session speaker, Erik Warnken, from Denver Health.

Denver Health Streamlines Access to Critical Medical Applications

Figure 3. Watch the case study with Erik Warnken at Denver Health.

Highlights

Highlights of the new capabilities discussed during VMware Explore week are also listed on the What’s New at VMware Explore 2023 (Enterprise Cloud tab) webpage.

VMware Aria Operations for Networks

“Hybrid Cloud Network Visibility Beta is now available, providing network traffic visibility from an SDDC across Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, AWS Direct Connect, and AWS Transit Gateway.

VMware Aria Operations for Networks Intelligent Assist Tech Preview is now available, which utilizes AI search with Large Language Models (LLMs) so users can input natural language queries to help solve network and traffic-related issues.

Network Insights Beta, using AI/ML, can analyze and help with root cause analysis of network traffic, anomalies, and dependencies.”

Figure 4. Customers get an overview of the VMware Aria Operations for Networks demonstration with VMware Staff Technical Marketing Architect Matt Just and Sr. Product Manager Sri Jeevaraj.

Figure 5. Hybrid Cloud Network Visibility showing traffic from one AWS VPC to another VPC.

Hybrid Cloud Network Visibility is a new feature that offers improved traffic visibility for AWS PaaS Services and network connectivity for AWS Direct Connect and Transit Gateway. This feature enhances security by identifying traffic more effectively, giving modern visibility across AWS inter-VPC traffic communications. For example, we can now see network and application traffic from VMware Cloud on AWS to AWS from one VPC to another VPC. This new feature will be supported across On-Premises, Public Cloud, and VMware Cloud. By utilizing Hybrid Cloud Network Visibility, businesses can ensure better security and control over their network traffic.

Figure 6. Using VMware Aria Operations for Networks with Intelligent Assist (Tech Preview) to ask a simple question without having to know the more complex search syntax.

In today’s fast-paced IT organization, quickly finding information is essential. VMware Aria Operations for Networks with Intelligent Assist (Tech Preview) offers a solution to this problem. With its Large Language Model (LLM) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, users will be able to easily search for network and traffic information using natural language queries. This new AI capability will eliminates the need for complicated search syntax and simplifies complex queries. The improved search functionality will saves users time and effort and will improves productivity and decision-making for businesses. With VMware Aria Operations for Networks with Intelligent Assist, finding information will be easier.

Figure 7. The Network Insights with AI-based Root Cause Analysis (RCA)(Beta) screen. A better insights widget on the top right shows an anomaly that, if clicked on, takes you directly to the issue to troubleshoot quickly.

Network Insights with AI-based Root Cause Analysis (RCA) (Beta) is an AI-based analysis of the network topology and anomalies. The app-aware solution looks at network and traffic dependencies while correlating with AI and Machine Learning insights. The Network Insights (Beta) draws out app-aware network and traffic dependencies while creating correlations with how things are connected. This capability started with the Guided Network Troubleshooting (GNT) feature and expanded with more AI and ML. Yes, this is our previous name before VMware Aria. Still, Network Insights is the most fitting name that the team decided to use for the capabilities we will do with AI/ML to increase visibility so customers can become more proactive.

New for VMware Explore 2023

Here is an overview of the new capabilities discussed at VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas

Application Awareness

• Flow Based Application Discovery support for .CSV CMDB upload as a starting point, e.g. a Service Now .csv

• VMware HCX troubleshooting enhancements: Identify MON (Mobility Optimized Networking) enabled flows and VMs

Day 2 Assurance Verification

• Network Insights with AI-based Root Cause Analysis (RCA) (Beta)

• Network Map support for Bulk Select, Reset group, Drag & Drop, and other grouping enhancements

Multi-Cloud

• Hybrid Cloud Network Visibility (Beta)

• SNMP notifications enhancements for Problem entity and Entity manager (IBM Netcool fields)

Platform, Usability & Supportability

• VMware Aria Operations for Networks with Intelligent Assist (Tech Preview)

• Ubuntu 20.04 Support

• TLS 1.3 support

• CPU and core licenses mixing on the same platform with Universal licensing

• Bulk Upload through .CSV for Network Devices

• Fortinet Device Discovery

Figure 8. Thanks to the VMware Aria team here that made all this possible!

If you missed any sessions at VMware Explore, watch the sessions on-demand, which will be available after tomorrow, August 25, 2023, in the VMware Explore Video Library.

VMware Explore 2023 Las Vegas was a busy week. We hope you learned a lot about VMware’s technology and solutions, including the new capabilities of VMware Aria Operations for Networks. These new capabilities will help you better run your network infrastructure for your business applications.

See you at VMware Explore Barcelona on November 6-9, 2023

Figure 8. VMware Sr. Director Dave Overbeek and Staff Technical Marketing Architect Matt Just at a VMware Aria and Tanzu Customer and Partner Party during VMware Explore week. See you at VMware Explore Barcelona 2023 soon.