If you have been in the VMware ecosystem, you must be familiar with the marketing practices of the company, namely rebranding products and whole portfolios, after a few years when a product starts to lose traction or to promote side products like cloud offerings.
It is the case for VMware Aria which was announced at VMware Explore 2022 that we will discuss in this article. So get ready for a lot of new marketing terms.
What is now called VMware Aria used to go by VMware vRealize Cloud Management, which was a portfolio for an “intelligent hybrid cloud management solution” to be quoted by VMware themselves. The products included in that offering were:
- VMware vRealize Automation and vRealize Automation Cloud
- VMware vRealize Operations and vRealize Operations Cloud
- VMware vRealize Log Insight and vRealize Log Insight Cloud
- VMware vRealize Network Insight and vRealize Network Insight Cloud
In 2022, VMware rebranded this Suite as VMware Aria to help customers navigate the complexity of their multi-cloud solutions. To quote VMware once again:
“VMware Aria is an intelligent multi-cloud management solution that enables you to consistently deploy and operate your apps, infrastructure, and platform services across private, hybrid, and multiple clouds from a single platform with a common data model.”
During one of the talks at VMware Explore, the speaker explained that one of the challenges VMware identified from customers feedback was personas duties and how to make the portfolio better aligned to business needs from an organizational perspective.
As a result, the VMware products and services within the VMware Aria portfolio are now segregated into 3 main verticals – Cost, Operations and Automation. However, you can see how those relate to existing products:
- VMware Aria Automation (formerly, vRealize Automation)
- VMware Aria Automation for Secure Clouds (formerly, CloudHealth Secure State)
- VMware Aria Operations (formerly, vRealize Operations)
- VMware Aria Operations for Networks (formerly, vRealize Network Insight)
- VMware Aria Operations for Logs (formerly, vRealize Log Insight)
- VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth (formerly, CloudHealth)
VMware Aria Graph
While it is still unclear what this is, Aria Graph is defined as a new cloud-scale data store technology. Its purpose is to offer an API first approach to have a consolidated view across multi cloud environments. Instead of having a bunch of UIDs for all types of elements on vSphere, vRA, vROPS, AWS, Azure… There will be a single ID type that is consistent across the board.
VMware Aria Graph is powered by GraphQL instead of REST in vRealize. GraphQL is a query language and there is essentially only three types of request operations:
- Queries are the essence of GraphQL, fetching information about specific objects
- Mutations provide the ability to request the server to perform an action on objects
- Subscriptions provide the ability to track changes in the system as they occur
VMware Aria Hub
VMware Aria Hub was announced as Project Ensemble during VMworld 2021. It is a multi-cloud management platform that unifies the management disciplines of cost, performance, configuration, and delivery automation with a common control plane and data model for any cloud, any platform, any tool, and every persona. It helps align multiple teams and solutions on a common understanding of resources, relationships, historical changes, applications, and accounts, fundamental to managing a multi-cloud environment.
During VMware Explore Barcelona, VMware introduced VMware Aria Hub free tier, maybe in the hopes that people will try to push through the confusion and give it a try.
This new free tier enables you to inventory, map, filter, and search resources from up to two of your native public cloud accounts, currently from either AWS or Microsoft Azure. It also helps understand relationships of resources to other resources, policies, and other key components in your public cloud and Kubernetes environments. You also get security insights with CIS benchmark violation and list price costing.
VMware Aria Universal Suite
VMware Aria Universal Suite is just a rebranding of vRealize Universal Suite, with a suite of vRealize products to manage SaaS and on-premises environments. It combines capabilities for automation, operations, log analytics, network visibility, cost optimization, and security and compliance into one license.
VMware Aria Migration
VMware Aria Migration is still at the Tech Preview stage as this article is being published and targets organizations that want to migrate from a single dedicated infrastructure to flexible multi-cloud environments. With this type of project being lengthy and complicated, VMware wants to simplify and streamline the process with a 3-step path:
- Assessment: Identify network flows between apps, discover services, app tiers and VMs/servers that comprise the app
- Planning: Machine Learning driven process to understand app boundaries, app migration complexities, and dependencies. Work with security to define policies and boundaries for workloads to ensure compliance throughout the migration
- Migration: Automated migration waves of workloads at scale using vRealize Network Insight Toolkit with VMware HCX
These migration waves allow customer to cut the bulk of the work into chunks for a controlled migration.
VMware Aria Guardrails
In the span of only a few months, VMware announced vRA Cloud Guardrails and then rebranded it under the Aria portfolio, which doesn’t help to clear up the confusion around the offerings and portfolios out there.
While it is somewhat marketed as a product, VMware Aria Guardrails is a governance capability of vRealize Automation (now Aria Automation).
Guardrails are high-level rules or policies that provide ongoing governance for private and public cloud environment such as:
- S3 buckets must not be public
- EC2 instance of type *.xlarge & beyond is not allowed
- Only the US-East region is allowed
- Resources must have specific tags
- VMs must be compliant to CIS OS Configuration Benchmarks
VMware Aria Business Insights
VMware Aria Business Insights is a capability of VMware Aria Hub that leverages AI/ML to organize symptoms across apps automatically and infrastructure based on events. The point is to cut through the noise and provide context to address issues in your multi-cloud environment and improve SLA.
Event management has been in the cloud management suite of VMware for a while now, but Business Insight claims AI/ML will bring significant noise reduction. The user will provide feedback to the insights for the solution to learn in a continuous improvement loop.
Wrap up
While it does seem to make sense from a business perspective, it has become increasingly tricky to keep up with VMware’s constant marketing rebranding and the sprawling of products and portfolios. I personally struggle to keep a brid’s eye view over what is going on as things change so fast.
However, VMware Aria will likely bring interesting data and facilitate decision-making up the management layers by improving visibility, granted you figure out what product, offering or subscription you need.
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