VMware Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations)

Today, VMware is introducing the new vRealize Cloud Universal subscription. With this new hybrid subscription offering, VMware is providing customers the flexibility to consume both on-premise and SaaS vRealize Suite products and services using a single subscription license. This offering allows customers the freedom to move workloads between on-premise and SaaS offerings interchangeably without the requirement to purchase new licenses. Additionally, this new offering provides access to Cloud Federated Analytics and Cloud Federated Catalog capabilities.

I just wanted to provide a quick post to bring attention to the latest VMware Security advisory VMSA-2020-0009. The products affected include: vRealize Operations 7.5.0 vRealize Operations 8.0.x vRealize Operations 8.1.0 If you utilize the vRealize Operations Application Remote Collector (ARC) appliance to monitor operating systems or applications via the Telegraf agents, you should immediately implement the workaround documented in VMware KB79031. While two vulnerabilities were announced, both relating to Salt, an open-source project by SaltStack, the authentication bypass vulnerability (CVE-2020-11651) received a CVSSv3 base score of 10.

VMware’s vRealize Operations is an excellent monitoring, analytics, and self-driving IT operations platform that supports numerous applications and infrastructure systems out of the box. Management packs are available from both VMware and third-parties to extend these out of the box capabilities to a wide variety of additional applications and infrastructure systems. Unfortunately, management packs aren’t available for every hardware device that you might need to monitor. In these situations, monitoring via SNMP might be your only choice.

VMware has released a new maintenance update to vRealize Operations 8.0 that includes performance and stability improvements. The list of resolved issues in vRealize Operations 8.0.1 includes: The rsyslog service does not run with vRealize Operations Manager parameters. After Service Discovery is configured, the Execute Script and Get Top Processes actions do not work from the Inventory > Objects page. The Set Memory of VM action does not work and the memory hot plug is not supported on virtual machines.

I have been using vRealize Operations to monitor the compliance of virtual machines against the DISA VMware vSphere Virtual Machine STIG for quite some time now. With the release of the new VMware vSphere 6.5 Virtual Machine STIG, I have discovered that vRealize Operations does not collect all the necessary information out of the box to verify compliance with the new STIG rules. Rather than waiting for VMware to provide an update to vRealize Operations, I decided to utilize vRealize Orchestrator to add custom properties to the virtual machines in vRealize Operations using the vRealize Operations REST API.