VMware Aria Automation 8.11 is Now Available

January 23, 2023

Reading time: 6 minutes

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.

This post is broken into the following sections:

What’s New
- What’s New in Aria Automation 8.11
- What’s New in Aria Automation Orchestrator 8.11
API Changes
- API Changes in Aria Automation 8.11
Resolved Issues
- Resolved Issues in Aria Automation 8.11
- Resolved Issues in Aria Automation Orchestrator 8.11

What’s New

What’s New in Aria Automation 8.11

New Consume Tab in the UI – Catalog, Deployments, Resources, Virtual Machines, Volumes, and Networking & Security are all moved under a single “Consume” tab within the Service Broker UI. This UI change introduces a new Projects filter option that filters all Catalog and resource views by the same project values as shown in the screenshot below. Unfortunately, selecting a value for this filter does not prepopulate a new catalog request with the select Project value as multiple projects can be used in the filter.

Screenshot of the new project filter within the new Consume tab in Aria Automation Service Broker

Capacity Management Enhancements - CPU Allocation Limits – You can now specify a maximum CPU allocation percent globally and per host/cluster. During provisioning, these properties are checked for placement and prevent CPU overallocation in the host/cluster. See How to manage infrastructure capacity for more details.
AD Group Support within Service Broker for Day-2 Action Policy – Day-2 action policies within Service Broker have been enhanced to support AD groups in addition to users during configuration.
SaltConfiguration Property is No Longer Available in Cloud Assembly Template – The saltConfiguration property is no longer supported from cloud templates. In order to deploy minions and state files as a day 0 action, it is recommended to update the cloud templates and use the SaltStack Config resource. See How to add the SaltStack Config resource in Cloud Assembly designs for more details.
Snapshot Limits in Aria Automation are Independent of vSphere Backups – The snapshot limit set through Aria Automation no longer interferes with the snapshot actions (such as scheduled backups) directly performed on vSphere.
Enable Change Project for Deployments with Ansible Resources – The change project action is now available for deployments that contain Ansible resources.
Enable Change Project for Deployments with Terraform Resources – The change project action is now available for deployments that contain Terraform resources.
Google Cloud Platform - Support for Shared VPCs in Aria Automation – Google Cloud Platform Shared VPCs are now discoverable within Aria Automation when a new Google Cloud Platform account is added. See Create a Google Cloud Platform cloud account for more details.
Google Cloud Platform - Day 2 Action - Ability to Create a Snapshot of VM and Attached Disks – You now have the option to create a snapshot as a Day 2 action on a Google Cloud Platform resource. Snapshots include a snapshot of the VM and a snapshot of all attached disks.
Google Cloud Platform - “Reset VM” Available as Day 2 Action for Google Cloud Platform VMs – Aria Automation now provides a Day 2 action called, Reset VM. This option wipes the memory contents of the VM and resets the VM to its initial state.
AWS - Support for** VMware Cloud on AWS Environments in an AWS GovCloud Region** – Aria Automation now supports connecting to and managing VMware Cloud on AWS environments hosted in an AWS GovCloud Region.
Azure - Support for Selecting Azure Availability Zones – Aria Automation now supports selecting Azure Availability Zones where deployments should be deployed. By setting the attachAvailabilityZone boolean property in the blueprint to true, you can facilitate the allocation mechanism to work with availability zones supportability, based on tags, and selected flavor mapping. See Create a Microsoft Azure cloud account for more details
Guardrails - Dry Run a Guardrails Template in an Azure Environment – You can now test run a Guardrails template against an Azure environment without making any changes to the environment.
Guardrail/Azure - Create a Guardrails Template from an Existing Azure Environment – You can now create a Guardrails template from an Azure environment and use it as a desired state.

What’s New Aria Automation Orchestrator 8.11

Maintenance and Bug Fixes – Aria Automation Orchestrator 8.11 focuses on maintenance and bug fixes.

API Changes

API Changes Aria Automation 8.11

Content API

New endpoint and payload to patch the content source changing the state from unshared to shared and vice versa.
- PATCH /content/api/sources/{id}

Resolved Issues

Resolved Issues in Aria Automation 8.11

External Aria Automation Orchestrator fails to start after the change of the Aria Automation certificate - If the system property com.vmware.o11n.certPathValidator is enabled with Aria Automation Orchestrator configured to use an external Aria Automation as the authentication provider and Aria Automation certificates are replaced with a certificate from the same Certificate Authority, then Aria Automation Orchestrator UI would issue a 404 error in the browser.
First firewall rule defined in Aria Automation deployment is failing in Aria Automation UI - The Day-2 reconfigure action is failing for the new security group without rules in deployment. When empty, security groups are configured and updated later. Aria Automation fails but the group actually gets updated.
Service Broker Deployments filter not set correctly when navigating from Cloud Assembly with Project filter - In Cloud Assembly, when users select a project in the filter, and then go to the Service Broker, deployments were also filtered by that project. The only way to change it is to click “Clear All”.
Windows Vulnerability Results not always showing the ‘description’ value - From SaltStack Config, when viewing a Windows Vulnerability, the description value wasn’t consistently being displayed.
Puppet: Command line length error when invoking script to install agent - Previously, the puppet facts sent from Aria Automation contained information on all hosts present in the deployment. When the script to install the puppet agent and apply the facts was run, the maximum character length of arguments of a bash command was exceeded, which resulted in a deployment failure.

Resolved Issues in Aria Automation Orchestrator 8.11

An external Aria Automation Orchestrator deployment fails to start after changing the Aria Automation certificate - In Aria Automation Orchestrator 8.10.2 servers authenticated with an external Aria Automation instance, if the system property com.vmware.o11n.certPathValidator is enabled, replacing the Aria Automation certificate with a certificate from the same Certificate Authority can cause you to receive a 404 error when accessing the Aria Automation Orchestrator Client.