Hybrid Cloud: VMware Aria Automation (formerly vRealize Automation (VRA))

VMware’s Aria Automation (formerly vRealize Automation) cloud management platform provides consistent automation across clouds and data centers.

• By Mensah Alkebu-Lan
• 25 July 2023

Hold on to your hats 🎩👀

We've introduced a new plugin-based framework in #AriaAutomation to overcome the challenges around the public cloud. ☁️ Explore all the features. https://t.co/pEjsUeGwQV pic.twitter.com/LfMtbV70IC

— VMware Aria Automation (@VMwareAriaAuto) July 18, 2023

Table of Contents

• Overview
• How VMware vRealize Suite supports the SDDC
• VMware’s Aria Automation (formerly VMware vRA)
• Included Tools
• References
  
  

Overview

A software defined data center (SDDC) is a data storage facility implemented using an infrastructure that is virtualized and delivered as a service to one or more customers. An SDDC can be deployed as a private cloud, a hybrid cloud, or a public cloud and can run on multiple hardware stacks, hypervisors, and clouds.

Further, if you understand cloud, it will be easier to understand VMware technology and, conversely, if you understand VMware technology, it will be easier for you to understand cloud. Let us take the infrastructure as a service delivery model for example. What a public cloud like Amazon Web Services seeks to achieve with its EC2 service is like what VMware seeks to achieve with its virtual machine.

Once you understand what makes the two technologies similar, it helps you understand what Infrastructure as a Service entails. It describes a suite of technologies provided by a service provider as an integrated solution to allow for elastic creation of a virtualized, networked, and pooled computing platform.

How VMware vRealize Suite supports the SDDC

When deploying a SDDC with VMware technologies, the core components are often VMware vSphere, VMware NSX, and VMware vSAN. For a mature SDDC, an organization may wisely choose to supplement these core components with an operations manager and automation manager.

The role of the operation manager is to automate operations management of the SDDC. This role can be satisfied with VMware’s Aria Operations (formarly vRealize Operations).

The role of automation manager can be satisfied with Aria Automation. More details on Aria Automation are given below.

VMware’s Aria Automation (formerly VMware vRA)

VMware’s Aria Automation (formerly vRealize Automation) cloud management platform provides consistent automation across clouds and data centers. It plays a fundamental role in SDDC deployment. It is one product in the VMware Aria Suite (formerly vRealize Suite) of products.

With Aria Automation, organizations are able to rapidly be able to setup and manage multi-cloud environments. Whether its virtualized, hybrid or public cloud, organizations will be able to define optimized compliant software states and enforce them across your entire environment.

One of this technology’s benefits is helping you automate the delivery of IT services. Also, it is a DevOps-ready platform providing Kubernetes infrastructure automation capabilities.

This means not only virtual machines but also containers. The benefits of containers not only include improved resource management but also lightweight reproducible application deployment.

Some of its features include the use of a cloud agnostic template. This template will allow your organization to deploy on VMware cloud or any major public cloud. Another feature is being able to manage multiple clouds with templatized cloud and policy definition, cloud environment visibility and automation remediation.

Included Tools

One of the tools included within Aria automation is the Aria Automation Service Broker. This tool provides a single repository for all the organizations catalog items, which includes templates, workflows, and services from other sources.

Another tool it includes is Aria Automation Config. This tool automates provisioning, configuration, and deployment of software to virtual machines across your environment.

Contact us for more information on vRealize Automation.

References

1. “Modern Infrastructure Automation Platform VMware Aria Automation.” VMware. Accessed 24 July 2023. 
2. “VMware vRealize Automation Documentation.” VMware Docs. Accessed 24 July 2023. 
3. Walleit, Sina. “vRealize Automation - What it is and How it Works.” Parallels, 2 June 2021. Accessed 24 July 2023. 
4. “Overview: vRealize Automation Architecture.” CloudBolt Software. Accessed 24 July 2023. 
5. Dachev, Martin, and George P. Dimitrov. “Methods and apparatus to refresh a token.” U.S. Patent No. 11,438,328. 6 Sep. 2022. 
6. Savov, Boris, et al. “Methods, systems and apparatus for dynamically extending a cloud management system by adding endpoint adapter types.” U.S. Patent No. 11,552,855. 10 Jan. 2023. 
7. Larson, Bridger Ronald. Selecting Cloud Platform Services Based On Application Requirements. Brigham Young University, 2016. 
8. Genchev, Stoyan, et al. “Methods and apparatus to expose cloud infrastructure resources to tenants in a multi-tenant software system.” U.S. Patent Application No. 17/494,618.