2023/01

You might not know it from how VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator (formerly VMware vRealize Orchestrator) is marketed today, but originally, Aria Automation Orchestrator was bundled as a component of VMware vCenter Server. Titled VMware vCenter Orchestrator back in the day, it was one of the best ways to automate actions within your VMware vCenter Server. While vCenter Orchestrator was rebranded as vRealize Orchestrator, and now as Aria Automation Orchestrator, it is still included as a feature with each VMware vCenter Server license.

After testing a recent upgrade to VMware vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3i, I encountered an issue where the vCenter Server would no longer authenticate users via smart cards/X.509 certificates. The vCenter Server would not even request a certificate from the client’s browser anymore. This seemed odd as the functionality worked fine on the previous 7.0 Update 3h. Surely VMware wouldn’t make a breaking change within a minor patch release? After reverting the upgrade and testing that it wasn’t an issue with the upgrade process itself, a support ticket was opened with VMware support.

VMware released the latest update to the VMware Aria Suite, VMware Aria Automation 8.11, on January 20, 2023. This release focuses primarily on improvements to public cloud support, Guardrails improvements (SaaS offering only), minor product enhancements, and bug fixes.

If you have deployed a VMware ESXi 7.0 or 8.0 host containing a TPM 2.0 device, you have likely encountered the “TPM Encryption Recovery Key Backup Alarm” in vCenter reminding you to back up your TPM encryption recovery key. Screenshot showing the “TPM Encryption Recovery Key Backup Alarm” in the VMware vSphere Client If you’re like me, the first time you encountered this, you probably searched Google for this alarm message and ran across VMware KB81661 - “TPM Encryption Recovery Key Backup” warning alarm in vCenter Server.

Aria Automation Orchestrator + Node.js Introduction With the release of VMware vRealize Orchestrator 8.1 in April 2020, VMware added the ability to utilize new languages within your workflows and actions. These new languages included PowerShell, Node.js, and Python. Since then, I have seen very few documents detailing the use of this capability. Recently though, while attempting to migrate some legacy scripts from a vRealize Orchestrator 7.6 deployment to vRealize Orchestrator 8.