Automation

Synology Logo Getting Started with the Synology Storage Console for VMware I have used VMware vSAN and a Synology DS1821+ for several years for my home lab’s storage. However, up to now, I have never deployed the Synology Storage Console for VMware. Realizing that the console might have valuable benefits, I decided it was time to try it. This post will walk through the deployment process for the Synology Storage Console for VMware and review its various features.

Before the addition of Automation Central to VMware Aria Operations (formerly VMware vRealize Operations), I had created my own method of cleaning up outdate snapshots. I documented this method of executing VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator workflows to remediate alerts in my blog post from 2019 titled Automated Alert Remediation in vRealize Operations 7.x using vRealize Orchestrator. This process involved creating an alert in VMware Aria Operations that would be generated when a snapshot reached a specific age.

VMware released the latest update to the VMware Aria Suite, VMware Aria Automation 8.11.1, on February 21, 2023. This release focuses primarily on customized notifications in Service Broker, CPU/Storage capacity enhancements, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) improvements, minor product enhancements, and bug fixes.

In my previous blog post Managing ESXi Local User Accounts from vCenter Server Using PowerCLI, I provided a quick walkthrough of how to manage ESXi local user accounts using VMware PowerCLI and VMware vCenter Server. This post will provide a similar walkthrough, but I will utilize VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator this time. Getting Started This walkthrough assumes that you already have a working VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator deployment and that you’ve already established a connection to your VMware vCenter Server instance from VMware Aria Automation Orchestrator.

There was once a time early in my career when I would SSH to each VMware ESXi host and manually update the root account’s password. As time went by and the environment I was responsible for grew larger, so did the workload for resetting root account passwords regularly. Eventually, I researched and learned that these VMware ESXi local user accounts could be modified using VMware PowerCLI, and password updates became a much easier task.