Orchestration

While VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator 8.x includes a plug-in, workflows, and actions for automating VMware Aria Automation, I often find these workflows and actions to be simple and nowhere close to supporting the extensibility outcomes I require. Instead, I frequently must work directly with the VMware Aria Automation REST API. At first, the idea of writing code to utilize the API seemed a bit daunting, but with the help of the Aria Automation 8.

Before the addition of Automation Central to VMware Aria Operations (formerly VMware vRealize Operations), I had created my own method of cleaning up outdate snapshots. I documented this method of executing VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator workflows to remediate alerts in my blog post from 2019 titled Automated Alert Remediation in vRealize Operations 7.x using vRealize Orchestrator. This process involved creating an alert in VMware Aria Operations that would be generated when a snapshot reached a specific age.

VMware released the latest update to the VMware Aria Suite, VMware Aria Automation 8.11.1, on February 21, 2023. This release focuses primarily on customized notifications in Service Broker, CPU/Storage capacity enhancements, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) improvements, minor product enhancements, and bug fixes.

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.

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.