Aria Archives - Sargon Khizeran

Shipping logs off to a repository for the benefit of troubleshooting, root cause analysis, post mortem reporting and today with AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies, particular findings and trendings in logs can be proactively shared to an operator.

For the following article will demonstrate integrating vSphere with Aria Operations for Logs and ensuring your hosts get updated to point to your instance. Keep in mind that my instance is deployed as a ‘Small’ which is primarily targeted for POC environments, in an enterprise you should have a minimum of 3 appliance nodes and should have a VIP assigned. I do have ESXi 8.0 installed and have configured vSAN ESA.

From the vSphere console the following advanced setting for a host will shows Syslog.global.logHost is configured with a blank entry. After we are done, this will be populated.

Access your Aria Operations for Logs instance via Virtual IP or single instance name, if you receive the following prompt, this is generally an indication your instance has never been configured.

Click ‘Configure vSphere Integration’

You will be taken to where you can integrate a vCenter instance, (Do not use a local SSO account, create a service account separately)

If we leave the checkbox highlighted in yellow, this is what will be pushed out to configure ESXi hosts send logs to Aria Logs.

When clicking ‘Advanced option’ it will display and allow you to select specific hosts and even a syslog protocol. Just note, you must click ‘Test Connection’ and Accept thumbprint from the vCenter before it can poll hosts.

For our write up, I will only select esxi01 with UDP. Click ‘Save’ and ESXi hosts will be configured in addition to any vCenter logs. Once completed your vSphere Integration will like this. You can click next vSphere for refresh, VC Collection status is healthy and if you click ‘View Details’ it will show hosts configured and not configured in vCenter.

When you go back to the host and check the Advanced Setting, you will now see it populated with Aria Logs instance

If you want to go back and makes changes to what ESXi hosts and collections, you can go back into the vSphere Integration and then have options, in our case, I will come back and configure my 2 other hosts.

By now you should have logs from hosts and vCenter shipped to Aria Operations for Logs.

During this Greenfield deployment of my home lab, I’m going to be rolling with the latest Aria Easy Installer, like its predecessor (vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager) this too includes initial deployment of the Aria LCM appliance, Aria Automation & VMware Identity Manager.

I’ve performed some pre-requisite work such as reserving IP’s, Forward and Reverse DNS entries, and will be deploying this on a 3-node vSAN ESA cluster. The steps below will be using the Windows UI interface of the installer.

Ensure you check out the latest Release Notes for Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.12 and if you would like to learn more about Aria Suite, be sure to check out VMware’s site: Aria Platform Lifecycle

Click Install

These are the products that are part of the initial deployment of the Aria Suite

The next screen will be to Accept EULA or CEIP (optional)

For the ‘Appliance Deployment Target’ you will want to connect to a vCenter Server, if you want to take additional security measures and avoid using default @vsphere.local accounts, you may create one in vCenter and use that for the association. The following document provides the details on the permissions; VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle: Assign a user role in Center

I will be using an AD account I’ve created and because my LDAP is the default Identity Source, I just have to put the user account and not append domain.

On the next screen select ‘Compute Resource’ and click Next.

For our install we will be installing it on our vSAN datastore

Next screen will be ‘Network Configuration’

For the ‘Password’ Configuration ensure you document everything this password is used for. This is critical for future troubleshooting, lifecycle and if you are doing any kind of password rotation.

Populate information regarding initial appliance deployment for Aria LCM

The next step is the Identity Manager Configuration, there is an option to import a version deployed outside of Easy Installer and there are additional options below regarding syncing Active Directory.