VMware Aria Automation (formerly vRealize Automation)

VMware has released the latest update to the vRealize Suite, vRealize Automation 8.7, on March 22, 2022. With this release, VMware has provided several enhancements and new features, including a next-generation On-Prem ABX Engine, enhancements to vRealize Automation SaltStack Config, additional OS support for SaltStack Config SecOps Compliance, minor UI changes, and several changes related to deployments. What’s New Updates included in vRealize Automation 8.7.0: Next-generation On-Prem ABX Engine - New Function as a Service (FaaS) engine is much faster, fixes numerous issues with memory limits, and introduces memory-based throttling.

For several years, VMware has been adding new integration capabilities into new releases of VMware Tools. These capabilities often supported VMware products, including vRealize Operations, NSX, AppDefence, and Carbon Black. The latest product to be integrated into VMware Tools 12.0.0 is VMware vRealize SaltStack Config. VMware Tools 12.0.0 now includes the ability to automate the deployment of the Salt Minion software utilizing vSphere virtual machine guest variables. This new integration makes it easier than ever to deploy new Salt Minions to both new and existing virtual machines.

VMware has been quite busy providing workarounds for all of their products that are affected by the recent Apache Log4j vulnerabilities CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046. One of the affected products is vRealize Automation 8.0 through 8.6.1. While VMware has stated that these vulnerabilities will be addressed in the future vRealize Automation 8.6.2 and vRealize Orchestrator 8.6.2 releases, they have provided a temporary workaround as detailed in KB87120 for vRealize Automation and vRealize Orchestrator versions 8.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past couple days, you’ve likely been seeing many articles regarding CVE-2021-44228 which describes a remote code execution vulnerability within Apache Log4j. Apache Log4j is a Java-based logging utility used by many applications across the world, and as such, this vulnerability is a huge issue due to how easy it is to exploit as well as the sheer number of vulnerable devices. Like most companies with Java based applications, many of VMware’s products utilize Log4j to provide application logging capabilities.

VMware vRealize Automation 8.6.1 was released on November 19, 2021. With this release, VMware has provided several enhancements and new features including significant Onboarding and Deployment enhancements, Extensibility and TKG improvements and new SaltStack and Carbon Black integration. What’s New Updates included in vRealize Automation 8.6.1 Assign icons to onboarded deployments - To give end user more information about deployments, vRA updates the deployment Edit action to support assigning custom icons to onboarded deployments.