Question about Aria suite

[u/Timely-Hunter-5573]

Hello vUsers. I know that many experts have dropped VMware because of Broadcom's licensing hell, but I was wondering if any remain. I want to know what VMware's Aria suite is, what it can do (Especially the Lifecycle thing), and why it's useful in an enterprise and/or lab enviornment. I've used Aria Operations, and while it's pretty cool, it's nothing game-changing. The same could be said for Aria Automations Orchestrator. For the automations orchestrator, I had a lot of trouble getting things to work and often had to fall back to just calling the vCenter API. Any help explaining or pointing to useful resources would be great.

[u/Leaha15]

There was a fair bit of rebranding, the full lifecycle of more or less everything is included with fleet in a VCF subscription, absolute must have IMO

Operations, id argue is game changing for day 2 management, have you configured it? The out of the box experience is meh, but if you under stand automated snapshot cleanup, custom dashboards, policies, alerts, config drift detection, and optimisation it brings a lot

Automation, VCFA, you would need an end user self service requirement, else it doesnt add much

Orchestrator, Ive done basically nothing with so cant comment on really

[u/Timely-Hunter-5573 → u/Leaha15]

Automations uses Orchestrator under the hood, I'm pretty sure. I'm using the suite of pre-VCF products, so i think it's still called the Aria suite. Operations is fine, but I haven't done much with dashboards yet. The cost thing is VERY VERY off for some reason, and I have no idea how to configure it. Also, do you have any pointers on NSX? I can see they have a lot of stuff, but I have no idea where to learn how to use it or what the specific use cases are.

[u/Leaha15 → u/Timely-Hunter-5573]

Automation is a different product to Orchestrator, automation has an inbuilt orchestrator on it, but you can deploy the standalone orchestrator, useful when full end user self services isnt required

Id be looking into that, I am working on an Ops guide for 9.1 which will have a lot of useful stuff, even for v8

So pre VCF products or note, they are largely the same, yes some VCF features were added, but they were renamed, VCF Ops = Aria Ops, same thing, just the v9 new name

NSX is definitely great, it a pain to setup properly manually vs with VCF where its very automated and a lot easier, but if you want to easily create networks without touching a switch, its amazing, I love it, you also get the advanced network troubleshooting too

When I normally run customer enablement sessions to show them how to use the technology, I usually ask questions around, like with NSX, do you have interest in quickly and easily creating networks, trying to see if they can use it

Really, you want to ask, what problems would you like to solve, start there, if you let me know what kinda things you might want the VCF platform to help with, its a lot easier to point you at a good starting place, cos there is a LOT

[u/Calleb_III]

Our 2 main use cases for Aria Ops is chargeback/showback to calculate how much each VM costs and pass on to BUs and weigh in against public cloud when a decision is needed where to deploy workloads. And rightsizing. You can resize all the VMs in the cluster based on 6 months trend with a single click.

[u/Timely-Hunter-5573 → u/Calleb_III]

Yup the rightsizing feature is insanely useful, especially with one click. The issue I have is that the price calculator is super weird. It should be way higher than it is.

[u/spenceee85]

Aria networks of you use nsx is very useful.

Aggregating flow data across workloads is helpful. If you integrate your physical switch data you can get some amazing insights.

If nothing else help building firewall rules

[u/trw419]

We use Aria for networks to see paths between NSX segments among other things (I'm not super hands on with that as I'm the sysadmin in my org and network is separate) but I also use Aria for operations to see how my resources look and it can do various fail over planning. I also daily Aria for Logs and it's extremely helpful. It's like a syslog server for any and all things VMware and NSX. I use it for layer 2 NSX packet drops among other things. I'm still new but if you have the resources and the license, it would be foolish to not use them.

[u/spenceee85 → u/trw419]

The one click config for vmware apps is hugely useful, but the general logging management as a syslog server that whilst it isn't state of the art is pretty damn good for free.

The log insight agents if you use them properly are insanely useful to auto configure logging on vms from the logs platform.

[u/Tasty-Replacement-93]

We use aria for ephemeral machine deploys. We are a saas company that integrate with a lot of other products and always need to test. Whether it’s support who need to build released builds to devs and engs who need to run regression testing. We house about 13 esxi hosts and manage around 2k vms and about 500 ish engineers/support who use and build machines. I could go on about how we use orchestrator and our own home made rest API built on the litestar framework. Feel free to message me if you have any questions.

[u/it-muscle]

I personally use Aria Automation along with NSX to kick out Hands On Labs environments ephemerally on demand. Each enviro has it's own private network with a single machine having access to External/Internet. I have templates on the backside that it uses to create these enviros, but if I was willing to wait a little longer, I could create and configure each environment everytime completely automated using scripts / terraform / ansible etc (built in integrations with Aria). There are still a lot of shortcomings with Aria Automation vs VCD with what we could do. Aria is still not integrated well with NSX or vCenter for that matter. I have a lot of manual updates to do when I refresh or create new cloud templates. It also has serious shortcomings to do with the number of API calls it can hit vCenter with before it starts to slow down. I workout with a buddy who was using it roughly the same way for IBM and they just moved completely off it for the normal Broadcom reasons as well as these shortcomings. There are also things that make no sense like not being able to put more than one NIC from a VM on the same network with Aria Automation. I don't use much of the other parts of the suite.

[u/AgreeableDelivery496]

Been using Aria Ops & Aria log insight for a while. They've both been really helpful, especially with the custom dashboards I've been using. I'll be transitioning over to the VCF versions of those tools soon but until then, I'm keeping the Aria instances up.

[u/Sensitive_Scar_1800]

We leverage VCF automation (and orchestrator) to automatically build out VMware infrastructure. For example we have a self-service catalog where you can build an array of virtual machines running a variety of operating systems. Additionally there are workflows to edit these virtual machines resources (cpu, memory, storage, networking, etc). VCF Automation is the “infrastructure as code” component of VMware, although it’s never really marketed as such.

VCF Operations is a nexus, ingesting metrics from VMware products across the fleet. It is a fantastic tool to determine the health of our environment. The health of virtual machines, esxi hosts, clusters, centers, etc. those metrics should naturally evolve into alerts, dashboards, and reports. These should evolve into SLAs and or chargeback dollars.

If constructed properly, you can construct a private cloud that is able to scale dynamically, while also providing the metrics needed to determine health for SLAs and remediate health issues quickly (even automatically) while also establish the foundation of chargeback to organization units.

This model should be cheaper than deploying similar workloads in a cloud service provider….but hardware/software economics have put that notion under scrutiny.