VMware Aria Automation (formerly vRealize Automation)

When it comes to vRealize Automation 8.0, VMware has been moving full steam ahead with rapid product updates containing new features, capabilities, and bug fixes. Continuing this trend, on January 17, 2020, VMware released the first hotfix for vRealize Automation 8.0.1. Included in it are three enhancements, ten improvements, and fifteen fixes for items relating to the IaaS API, Provisioning, Action-based extensibility (ABX), vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), and Virtual appliance/clustering. The hotfix can be installed using vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.

VMware has released a new update to vRealize Automation 8.0, bringing with it new features, as well as improvements and bug fixes. Unfortunately, vRealize Automation 8.0.1 still does not provide an upgrade/migration path from 7.x to 8.0. We likely will not see upgrade/migration functionality until version 8.1. New features in this release include: Migration from vRealize Automation 7.5 or 7.6 assessment vRealize Automation Migration Assessment Offline Capture Utility 1.0.0 allows you to collect data from your vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator, or external vRealize Orchestrator source environment offline.

vRealize Automation 8.0 brought with it a completely new method for controlling access to resources within our cloud environments. In previous versions of vRealize Automation, the concept of a Reservation existed, which provided a clear contract as to what compute, storage, and network resources a particular Business Group had access to as well as limits on the amount of memory and storage resources that the Business Group could consume. Fast forward to vRealize Automation 8.

As a followup to my Deploying VMware vRealize Automation 8.0 walkthrough, we’ll now utilize our new vRealize Automation 8.0 deployment to configure a basic Blueprint and provision our first virtual machine using Cloud Assembly. vRealize Automation 8.0 includes a great “Getting Started” wizard that we’re provided when we access our deployment for the first time. While this option gets us up and running the fastest with Cloud Assembly, it obscures the task required to begin using Cloud Assembly.

The latest release of vRealize Automation 8.0 is based on a completely rewritten codebase and is a dramatic departure from the previous versions of vRealize Automation. vRealize Automation 8.0 is an on-premise release of the VMware vRealize Automation Cloud SaaS offering that has been available for a while now. The platform consists of 3 components: Cloud Assembly, Cloud Broker, and Code Stream. The new vRealize Automation 8.0 virtual appliance includes these components as well as an integrated version of vRealize Orchestrator 8.