- Introducing the New VMware Aria Family Name Introducing the New VMware Aria Family Name!The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines an aria as “an accompanied, elaborate melody sung (as in an opera) by a single voice.” VMware Aria – a single cloud management solution – is the voice that promises to remove multi-cloud complexity that manifests itself as so much “noise” and restore melodious, harmonious cloud operations back to our customers.Note:
- Users may have to delete cookies/ refresh cache for rebranding changes to get reflected on some pages.
- Older events generated by the system (e:g in Audit logs) will not contain rebranded names.
- New Aria Automation unified tile with rebranded service names (SaaS only) All Aria Automation Cloud services are grouped under a unified service “Aria Automation” tile. Depending on the user license and role, you will see “Aria Automation Assembler” (formerly Cloud Assembly), “Aria Automation Service Broker”, “Aria Automation Pipeline” (formerly Code Stream) and “Aria Automation Config” (formerly SaltStack Config) as a family of services under “Aria Automation”.A new landing page also explains the details of this new structure and provides an introduction to Aria Automation. A new service switcher enables quick and easy navigation between services under Aria Automation. This configuration will be seamlessly enabled for all Aria Automation users.Note: This is not available for users accessing existing Aria Automation services from VMware Cloud Partner Navigator. In that scenario, the experience is not changed.You might have to delete cookies/ refresh the cache for rebranding changes to get reflected on some pages.Older events generated by the system, for example in Audit logs, will not contain rebranded names.For more information on VMware Aria Automation, see the Getting Started with VMware Aria Automation guide.
- New timeout options for extensibility action flows Users can now choose from two options for the setting maximum timeout during the initialization of ABX action flows:
- Set timeout value up to 5 hours
- Set no limit for flow run by leaving the timeout text box blank
- Ability to use Aria Automation to provision storage disk with thin provisioning type You can now set the provisioning type as thick/thin/eager or both on the storage profile and in cloud template as a property in attached disks. When the thin provisioning type is used, disk provisioning will proceed successfully even if there is not enough space in the datastore. This feature will be available for attached/independent disks.
- Introducing a new plug-in architecture for faster access to updated Native Public Cloud provider settings and a more agile Automation Assembler user experience Public cloud resources are continuously updated with new properties and operations. To enable quicker public cloud resource consumption, Aria Automation delivers new plug-in based designs and deployments model in Automation Assembler. The plug-in architecture results in faster access to updated provider settings and a more agile Automation Assembler user experience. When a cloud provider, such as AWS, adds more resources and properties, those resources and properties are easily added to the associated plug-in. Allocation policy is available for all new cloud resources. These resources can be used to create Virtual Cloud Templates and can be exposed as catalog items.This new architecture allows us to deliver new AWS services like EC2, S3 bucket, GP3, IO2 in cloud assembly canvas.Notes:
- 8.12 on-prem Aria Automation requires 48GB of memory. Before upgrading make sure you have secured the required memory.
- Some components are beta
- Ability to filter Audit Log from Aria Automation The Audit Log now allows administrators to track usage and consumption with Aria Automation. This feature includes these enhancements:
- Filter search for audit logs
- Filter search for audit logs
- Ability to display version history for content sources in Custom forms Custom forms in Aria Automation Service Broker now supports version history. Additionally, you can now apply custom forms to different versions of VMware Cloud Template.The custom forms author can now:
- Create multiple versions of a custom formReview a list for all versions of a custom formRestore to a previous version of the custom formCreate a new version of custom form based off the latest custom form versionAttach a custom form to a specific version of the content source item (only for Cloud Templates)
- Upcoming deprecation of the Virtual Private Zones functionality VMware is announcing intent to deprecate Virtual Private Zone and image mapping from provider to child tenant’s functionality. All customers using this functionality should start making plans to remove the configuration as the functionality will be removed in a future Aria Automation release with exact dates along with additional guidance to be announced. Please reach to your VMware contact for more information.
- IaaS API – Support for creating IPAM integration endpoint Previously, there was no API to create an IPAM integration endpoint in Aria Automation. Now, there is an API that allows admins to perform this task without going to UI. For information on how to use the IPAM integration endpoint, refer to How do I import an IPAM package.
- Ability to run Custom Actions and Out Of Box Day2 Actions in parallel VMware Aria Automation supports custom actions and out of box actions running on same resource or deployment, with these considerations:
- The custom action has to start first before the out of box action
- If there is one resource out of box action in progress, you can not start another action (neither custom action nor out of box action) on same resource or deployment; If there is one deployment out of box action in progress, you can not start another action (neither custom action nor out of box action) on same deployment or any of the resource
- If there is one resource custom action in progress, you can not start another custom action on same resource or deployment; If there is one deployment custom action in progress, you can not start another custom action on same deployment or any of the resource
- If there is in progress request on resource, day2 actions which end up deleting the resource will be blocked (e.g. deployment.delete, deployment.update, machine.delete, machine.remove disk). However, the removal operations (except the deployment related) are still allowed through IAAS API’s
- Parallel running actions might fail if they are conflicting with each other: running a custom action to install apache on a machine and out of box action Reboot on the same machine at the same time
- Ansible Automation Controller (previously Ansible Automation Tower) SupportAria Automation supports Automation Controller (previously Ansible Tower), which is part of Ansible Automation Platform.
- Ability to change project on a deployment that contains migrated, provisioned, and onboarded resourcesYou can now use the change project functionality on deployments that contain any combination of deployed, migrated and onboarded resources.Supported resources include these resource types and constraints: Deployments with deployed resources can contain virtual machines, disks, load balancers, networks, security groups, Azure groups, NATs, gateways, custom resources, Terraform configurations, and Ansible and Ansible Tower resources.
Automation Config What’s New
- Display latest salt grains data to users of Cloud Assembly for a more detailed resource view For VMs deployed using Automation Assembler with a Config resource, the latest salt grains data is displayed in the resource view (updated periodically every 6 hours).
Automation for Secure Hosts What’s New
- VMware Aria Automation for Secure Hosts supports CIS Benchmark for Windows 2022 VMware Aria Automation for Secure Hosts now has the latest CIS benchmark for Windows Server 2022.
Automation Orchestrator What’s New
- VMware vCenter 8 APIs are now available through the Automation Orchestrator plug-ins The following VMware vCenter APIs are now available through the Automation Orchestrator plug-ins:
- VMware vCenter 8 API through VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator Plug-in for vCenter Server
- VMware vCenter 8 Update Manager API through VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator Plug-in for vSphere Update Manager
- VMware vCenter 8 Auto Deploy API through VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator Plug-in for vSphere Auto Deploy
Known Issues
- The Automation Orchestrator debugger does not step into sub-actions The Automation Orchestrator action debugger does not step into inner actions called using the System.getModule(module).action() method.Workaround: Use the root action as the only element in a new workflow and debug the workflow using the workflow debugger.
- Inconsistent performance tier information for Azure machine when managed disk is resized using day 2 actions When an Azure disk with a Premium managed disk is resized with day 2 actions in Aria Automation, the baseline performance tier is updated accordingly in the Azure portal. However, the performance tier remains the same in the template in the Aria Automation custom properties. This leads to inconsistent performance tier information.No workaround.
Resolved Issues
- Check for read/write permissions of Aria Automation Orchestrator folders before running workflows The “Copy file from vCO to guest” and “Copy file from guest to vCO” workflows runs may fail due to read/write permission errors. When this happens, update the js-io-rights.conf with the desired read/write permissions for files and folders.
- Aria Automation workflow run intermittently fails to continue after answering user interaction When a workflow is waiting for an input from a user, the workflow run does not continue after the user answers the user interaction. The issue can be seen intermittently when the token that was used to start the workflow run has been revoked.
- In some scenarios users are not able to login to a provisioned VM using username/password After provisioning a VM with remoteAccess and usernamePassword authentication method, in some cases users were unable to login to the VM with the credentials from the Cloud Template.This issue is now fixed. After provisioning a VM, users can now login with username/password included in the Cloud Template.
- Tags on Azure cloud zone and compute deleted after upgrade Previously, when upgrading to vRealize Automation 8.11.0, some users noticed that tags on Azure availability zone computes were no longer available. Now, tags are not deleted after upgrading to a new release version.
- Running the ‘vracli cap’ enable/disable command that already has the same desired value returns error and non-zero exit code Previously, these commands would exit with a non-zero exit code if the given capability was already enabled (or disabled respectively).vracli capabilities <capability-name> –enable vracli capabilities <capability-name> –disable With the latest fix, these are not considered an error anymore and the aforementioned commands will exit with exit code 0 in these situations. Impacts: For typical usage (manually running the command), there is no impact. If automated scripts use these commands and expect them to exit with non-zero status and the capability does not need toggling, they might need to be updated.
- Not possible to add regex while comparing branch name in Git Webhooks You can pass regex as a branch name when configuring a Git webhook in Automation Pipelines.In previous releases, you were required to create a Git webhook per repository branch which resulted in multiple webhooks. Now, by providing a suitable regex, you can link a single webhook resource to multiple branches resulting in fewer webhooks both in Git and in Automation Pipelines.
- New runtimes available in Aria Automation Orchestrator In previous releases of Aria Automation Orchestrator, polyglot library versions were NodeJs – 14, Powershell – 6.2 or 7.1 (PowerCLI 11 or 12), and Python – 3.7. Users were unable to add a package supported by newer version of Polyglot and faced the TLS should be 1.2 or higher error.Now, these new runtimes were added In Aria Orchestrator Polyglot – Powershell 7.3.3 and Python 3.10. Users are now able to update packages without error using these environments.
- Automation Orchestrator using credentials of currently logged in user when updating scheduled tasks Previously, when a user attempted to update a scheduled task that they had created, the Use current user button did not use the credentials of the logged in user. Now, the Use current user button uses the correct user credentials.
Source: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Aria-Automation/services/rn/vmware-aria-automation-release-notes/index.html