In the fast-paced world of technology, VMware stays on top of game releasing more and more game-changing features, allowing customers to be more agile, secure and in control of it's multi-cloud operations. As we dive into the latest two months of developments bellow, keep in mind it's not an exhaustive list, you can find the release notes links to check all the details in each release.
VMware Aria Automation (formerly vRealize Automation)
Cloud: July release available on 22/Jul/2023 - Release notes:
- Support for external GCP TCP Load Balancer;
- Now administrators have a view of which objects are bilable from the home screen;
- New Day-2 action allow to change Azure disks tier;
- New Day-2 action to unregister VM from inventory without deleting it;
- On-boarded vSphere Machines can be rebuilded from Automation;
- There's now an option to ignore powered off VM from quota consideration;
- Root level blueprint custom form along with ability to import custom from from another catalog item;
Cloud: June release available on 24/Jun/2023 - Release notes:
On-premises: version 8.12.2 available on 29/Jun/2023
- It has been added Continuous management of protected VMs to the platform; when VMs protected by Site Recovery Manager fails over to the recovery site, Automation, will understand it's behavior and still able to manage it;
- Plugin based support for Google Cloud Provider (GCP) for resources;
- GPC Virtual MAchines, including GPU support;
- Shielded VM instance;
- Disk Snapshots (creation/deletion/update/restoring);
- Network resources; provision networks, subnets connected, VPC and more;
- Support for all GCP disk types (standar/extreme/ssd/balanced);
- Storage Buckets;
- Installation of salt minions agent uses Onedir packages now;
- More visibility into EC2 instances, like public IPs and list of NICs and volumes properties;
VMware Aria Automation Config (formerly SaltStack Config)
Cloud: July release available on 22/Jul/2023
- CIS benchmark for RHEL9;
- Import of Qualys vulnerability scans via API;
On-premises: version 8.12.2 available on 29/Jun/2023 - release notes:
- It's a maintenance release;
VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator
Cloud: July release available on 22/Jul/2023 - Release notes:
- New command line (CLI) has been delivered to allow the configuration using vracli vro;
On-premises: version 8.12.2 available on 29/Jun/2023 - release notes
- it's a maintenance release
- AWS Bulk onbard; upon adding a top level account, Hub will automatically discover the account hierarchy and topology;
- Elevated credentials model; Aria Hub is moving to the principle of least privilege, meaning you can give the services exactly the permission it needs, in case it needs a higher privilege to execute some automation or configuration it can leverage an elevated credential to do the task;
Sign up for the free tier here;
Cloud: June release - release notes
- Bulk onboard for Azure subscriptions;
- Ability to edit AWS account properties;
- Availability of modes for AWS;
- Monitoring mode; Guardrails will monitor the desire state and alert about drifts;
- Eforcement mode; Guardrails will enforce the desire state fixing the drifts found;
- Support for FedRamp Compliance Framework, based on NIST 800-53 (rev 5)
- Cloud Entitlement for AWS; allows for identification of which resource and access the user has;
- Integration with Amazon Security Lake, forwarding findings based on the standard OCFS;
- Unified tab in Aria Hub, called governance;
- Support for Amazon DocumentDB and FSX inventory to manage potential risks;
- New Compliance frameworks;
- CIS Azure Kubernetes Service, version 1.3.0
- CIS Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, version 1.3.0
- CIS Google Kubernetes Engine, version 14.0
- CIS Kubernetes v1.24
- CIS Kubernetes v1.25
- CIS Azure Foundation, version 2.0.0
- Support for Azure Government subscritpions;
- Enhanced Cloud Proxy command lines for better troubleshoting;
- Notification heartbeat; you can receive continuous alerts for as long the alert remains active;
- Metric search in Troubleshooting Workbench;
- New metric for Application Monitoring (telegraf) to identify if the agent is sending data or not, allowing you to act upon agent failures;
- Updated Compliance Packs;
- CIS_VMWARE_ESXi_6.7_Benchmark_v1.3.0;
- CIS_VMWARE_ESXi_7.0_Benchmark_v1.2.0;
- NSX-T 3.2 Security Configuration Guide;
- NSX-T 3.1 Security Configuration Guide;
- NSX-T 3.0 Security Configuration Guide;
VMware Aria Operations for Applications (formerly Tanzu Observability)
Cloud: from June to July releases - release notes
- Aria Operations for Applications is now a service under VMware Cloud Services platform; Existing subscriptions will be migrated to the portal over time;
- New Wavefront Proxy version 13 to support sending data to CSP through access token;
- Google Cloud Run Metrics is now available to be monitored;
- Ingestion of histogram metrics from Google Cloud Platform grouping functions;
- Amazon Web Services Usage metrics is now available;
- Updated instuctions to set up integrations with K8s collector for:
- Kafka;
- Redis;
- etcd;
- Cassandra;
- NVIDIA;
- VMware GemFire;
VMware Aria Operations for Logs (formerly vRealize Log Insight)
Cloud: June release available on 21/Jun/2023 - release notes
- Scheduled reports; allowing you to receive dashboards and reports on your desired interval;
- Federated Log, initial release of this capability that allows you to query your on-prem data of Aria Logs from the SaaS version;
VMware Aria Cost powered by CloudHealth (formerly CloudHealth)
Cloud: from June to July releases
- Kubernetes cost history for FlexOrgs is now general available. can be use for chargeback and showback;
- Kubernetes usage reports for FlexOrgs is now general available;
- Update to Anomaly Detection; subscriptions can be setup to receive e-mail notification;
- Display multi-cloud cost History Report in currencies other than USD;
- New AWS support region, ap-south1 (Mumbai)
- AWS Redshift rightsize (public beta), it looks for CPU and recommend others node types;
- AWS DynamoDB rightsize (public beta), allow cost savings suggesting better provisioning of tables;
- GPC Perspective support in FlexReports (public beta), enhancing usability for customers;
- New Azure Assets; Machine Learning Compute Resources, workspaces and more;
If you want to revisit what happened in April-May time frame, check my previous post.
