VMware Aria News announced during VMware Explore US 2023
This post is a quick summary of some of the news announced around the VMware Aria (aka vRealize) portfolio during VMware Explore US 2023
My main area of focus over the last few years has been the VMware Aria (or vRealize) portfolio. Hopefully we'll get through the event with no name changes this time, but we'll see..
In general there's a lot of focus on extending the portfolio with (generative) AI capabilities. Some of this has already been discussed and announced during the July Multi-cloud briefing which focused a lot on AI and what it means for multi cloud
Check out the other posts in the VMware Explore US 2023 series:
Aria Automation
For Aria Automation (aka vRA) the "new" features mainly focuses on integrations with public clouds. Both through the new Aria Automation plugin framework which will let you develop your own code for integrating with the native services, and a new offering for Aria Automation for Public cloud.
The Cloud Consumption Interface will GA which lets vSphere+ customers take advantage of Aria Automation SaaS to get started with delivering self-service for developers and others to Infrastructure resources.
Aria Hub and Graph
Aria Hub is one exiting product I alas haven't been able to play around with as much as I'd like.
One cool thing announced (and already initially available) is the centralized notification engine. In theory we can have one place to manage notifications across the Aria products which is pretty nice.
Aria Hub will also get some "generative" AI capabilities e.g. via a chatbot which can help navigate through your environment
and help write code for building out the environment
Aria Insights
Aria Insights is the new name for the tech preview announced last year, Aria Business Insights. Aria Insights is now released in Initial availability.
Insights is using AI/ML to help troubleshooting issues in your environment i.e. with a nice timeline view across Kubernetes, Azure and AWS integrated in Aria Hub and Graph. I.e. not for private vSphere environments as of now.
Troubleshooting Workbench (which is a term you might know from vRealize Operations) is a promising tool that can help show impacted resources and deep dive into issues.
Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth
Aria Cost is already in GA and has a lot of capabilities already. This comes from the aquistion of CloudHealth by VMware a few years back.
Kubernetes rightsizing is a cool feature which can recommend adjustments for K8S resources across clusters, namespaces and workloads.
Forecasting is a feature available in public beta where AI is used for predicting costs up to 36 months.
Aria Guardrails
Guardrails is a feature that has been available for some time and most of the "news" this time is already GA. One of the big things which has been a focus area across multiple vendors is the concept of Landing Zones in public cloud environments.
Aria Guardrails helps creating landing zones in AWS and Azure which can help provision new Cloud Accounts with the correct settings and policies.
Guardrails will also help manage and monitor policies and deliveres a type of Desired State configuration system and can both detect, visualize and also enforce configuration drift.
Guardrails is integrated with Aria Hub and will provide the ability to both visualize and interact with Guardrails directly from the Hub UI
Aria Migration
Aria Migration is announced as a Tech Preview and can help run cost comparison and plan for lifting and shifting from an on-prem vSphere environment to AWS public cloud or VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC). Although this feature is available in other tools Aria Migration will also look at the actual workloads and suggest the optimal size and configuration in the public cloud environment.
Aria Migration will also analyze network traffic to calculate the Egress traffic cost which is a very interesting feature.
Summary
There's not that much new stuff coming to the Aria products. In fact most of the things announced during the event is stuff they've already GA'ed or announced. A bit disappointing maybe, but hopefully just a result in the rather frequent release cycle on these products and not a sign of slowing down the development.
I find Aria Hub very interesting, but with more and more functionality included in Hub the gap between what can be done on-prem and in the cloud will get bigger. Many customers I've talked to won't be able to leverage these new management capabilities as they can't run their management tools in the cloud.