What’s New in VMware Aria Suite (VCF 5.2)

Introduction

VMware Aria Suite within VMware Cloud Foundation 5.2 brings a host of new features and enhancements designed to simplify management, improve security, and enhance operational efficiency. This article explores the latest updates and their benefits for your IT infrastructure.

• VMware Aria Automation

• Private Cloud Quick Start

The update includes an enhanced private AI catalog (from 8.18.0) with dedicated AI Workstation and AI Kubernetes Cluster templates. It also supports air-gapped container registry for DLVM and non-Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workloads, and day 2 actions for onboarded VMs.

• Modern IaaS Consumption

Introduces new CCI elements and a cloud admin dashboard (8.17.0), improving visibility and management of cloud resources. The launchpad (8.18.0) provides quick access to essential tools and functions. Launchpad eliminates time-consuming navigation from different tabs, and it gives the admin access to all the vital information in one center location to quickly set up.

• VCF Aria Operations – What’s New

• New Console Experience

A new console experience that efficiently manages and operates VCF across multiple VCs, including license management, certification management, identity management, and rich visual insights.

The update allows administrators to add multiple dashboards to the home page and make widget changes, such as filtering by the age of VMs and adding ancestor and descendant properties and metrics. The ability to filter alert lists by alert definitions and standardize report creation further enhances usability.

Adding multiple dashboards to the home page demo:

Global inventory feature offers multiple perspectives for viewing inventory, including compute, storage, and network consumption. Summary pages provide comprehensive data, and operational data (metrics, events, logs) for each inventory item are available, improving overall visibility and management.

• New VCF Diagnostics Experience

Enhances diagnostics and troubleshooting capabilities. This includes Skyline Health Diagnostics, Skyline Advisor, and Aria Operations for Logs. This new diagnostic experience helps in discovering, troubleshooting, and remediating issues efficiently.

Quick video overview of interface:

• Centralized License Management

Provides a centralized view and management of licenses, including subscription levels, entitlement management, license usage trends, and support for vCenter-based add-ons.

Quick video overview of that function:

• New Certificate Visibility

Enhances visibility and monitoring of certificates across the VCF infrastructure, ensuring that all certificates are tracked and managed efficiently.

Conclusion

The VMware Aria Suite within VCF 5.2 introduces significant enhancements that simplify management, improve security, and enhance operational efficiency. These updates help organizations optimize their cloud infrastructure and achieve greater agility and reliability.