2022

In my previous post titled Introduction to VMware vRealize Automation SaltStack SecOps, I provided an introduction to VMware Aria Automation SaltStack Automation SecOps, as well as a brief history and overview of the product’s capabilities. In this post, I’ll dive deeper into the product’s compliance management capabilities. Compliance Checks Compliance checks are at the foundation of VMware Aria Automation SaltStack SecOps compliance management. These checks provide the information necessary to identify the purpose of the check, the operating systems it applies to, the rationale for the check, and, more importantly, the state file responsible for implementing/remediating the check.

Recently, while attempting to change some settings on several instances of vRealize Orchestrator embedded within vRealize Automation 8.8.1 appliances, I found that I could not successfully authenticate to the vRealize Orchestrator Control Center interface. The interface is located at https://[vRA URL]/vco-controlcenter and requires that you provide the “root” user credentials to access it. Although I could authenticate to the virtual appliance consoles using the “root” credentials, I could not successfully authenticate to the vRealize Orchestrator Control Center interface.

Recently I began familiarizing myself with VMware vRealize Automation SaltStack Config in my home lab. While I'm still relatively new to the product, I was curious to learn more about the compliance and vulnerability management capabilities provided by the SecOps add-on. In this post, I introduce VMware vRealize Automation SaltStack SecOps and briefly review the various features and functionality provided by the product. In subsequent blog posts, I will give a more in-depth look at vulnerability management and compliance management capabilities.

VMware announced the initial availability (IA) of VMware vSphere 8.0 on October 11, 2022. This new status of “initial availability” follows the new release model that VMware is utilizing for all future vSphere releases. This new release of vSphere is packed with many new features as well as many deprecated features. For a quick overview of what’s new in this release, view the VMware Blog post: Announcing: vSphere 8 Initial Availability.

VMware vRealize Automation 8.8.1 was released on June 9, 2022. With this release, VMware has provided security updates and new features, including support for the vRealize Automation Extensibility (vREx) Proxy.