Category: VCF Operations

Cloud Management, vCenter Server, VCF Operations

Re-registering & Upgrading the Aria Operations vSphere Remote plugin

sargonkhizeran

vSphere plugins have always been a touchy subject with engineers, as many plugins in the past might’ve impacted the performance of the vSphere UI. Local plugins are deprecated in vSphere 8.x and future releases at this time. You can read more about that in the VMware By Broadcom article; vSphere Client Local plugins are deprecated.

Recently it caught my eye that vSphere was not capturing the correct version of Aria Operations, the functionality of the plugin still works. I’ve upgraded my version of Aria Operations to 8.18.1, however the plugin shows an older version

From the vSphere Client >> Go to the stack menu >> VMware Aria Operations, from the drop-down menu in that interface for the instance, you should see a version number. In our case, we’re at 8.16.0.0

I’ve found no clear way of upgrading the client, when you go back to vSphere Client >> stack menu >> Administration >> Solutions — Plugins, you should see the ‘VMware Aria Operations’

We have options where we can click on the plug-in, select to Remove it and then re-deploy it using Aria Operations console.

An additional option is simply re-registering the plugin using Aria Operations. From Aria Operations Console go to Administration >> Integrations >> click on one of the vCenters

Scroll to the bottom of the vCenter integration settings and click ‘Manage Registrations’

You can select the box to use ‘Use collection credentials’ and click Register

You should receive the following message

vCenter will display the following banner

When you go back into Aria Operations within vSphere, you should see the new version

Cloud Management, Home Lab, VCF Operations

What datastore is your VM running on? – Alerting using Aria Operations

sargonkhizeran

I had a customer reach out regarding VMs being deployed accidentally on local ESXi datastores or when a backup solution mounts a temporary datastore, the VM continues to run on it leaving it at risk.

Using Aria Operations 8.18.1, this was a multi-step process. We will create a Recommendation, Symptom & an Alert. An additional option after this is configuring the alert to be sent out as a notification.

Creating a ‘Recommendation’

From the Aria Operations homepage navigate to Operations >> Configurations >> ‘Recommendations’

Click ‘Add’

This is where you can type out a message to give specific instructions to recipients of the alert to give guidance on resolving. Once completed, click ‘Save’

When creating a ‘Recommendation’ you have the option to create a hyperlink to point to any external sites or internal systems, such as an ITSM link.

Creating a ‘System Definition’

From the Aria Operations homepage navigate to Operations >> Configurations >> ‘Symptom Definitions’

Click ‘Add’ under Metric/Property

For the first part, we will filter for a Property (see purple box) Select the Base Object Type as ‘Virtual Machine’ then Property and search for ‘datastore’ You should have a ‘Datastore(s)’ available. Click-Hold Property and drag it into the left side (see Green Box) to begin configuring with a name, you can then select a pre-populated datastore name or use a keyword such as ‘local’ or anything custom. Click ‘Save’ to completed this portion.

Creating an ‘Alert Definition’

From the Aria Operations homepage navigate to Operations >> Configurations >> ‘Alert Definition’ You can customize these options to reflect the severity of your symptom.

For the ‘Symptoms/Conditions’ section, we want to add the custom Symptom we created and drag-drop it to the left box.

On the next screen, you can add the recommendation we created earlier. Search for it on the right-side and drag-drop into the left and click Next.

Assign it to the desired policy, the following is the default policy, click ‘Create’

As a test, I migrated 3 VMs and found that alerts appeared.

I hope these instructions were helpful and can even be used as guidance for other symptoms you want to create or even modify out-the-box alerts and symptoms.

Cloud Management, VCF Operations

Configuring Active Directory as an Authentication Source in Aria Operations 8.18

sargonkhizeran

Aria Operations offers many options to integrate authentication sources, a list of them and details can be found in the following doc; Aria Operations – Authentication Sources.

My lab has Aria Operations 8.18 deployed and managed under Aria LCM appliance. I also have a cert provided from an internal AD CA (Active Directory Certificate Authority)

From the Aria Operations homepage go to ‘Administration’ >> ‘Control Panel’ and select ‘Authentication Sources’ From there click ‘Add’ and a configuration box will appear.

The settings below are default, for this configuration, I will not enable SSL/TLS right away.

If you happen to check SSL/TLS, you may receive the following error message if there is no certificate from your CA.

You can see it added the AD source, this will work, you can synchronize users and start importing them, but I want to update the source to make it use SSL

First, I will want to obtain my CA’s certificate chain and then import it into Aria Operations. This will download a *p7b cert for me, you can use CA to export to *.cer and rename the file to *.pem.

Back into Aria Operations, go to Administration >> Control Panel >> Trusted Certificates >> Click ‘Import’ The Windows browser will default to *.PEM and the file should appear, also not that Aria Operations will also take the *.p7b. You also have the option to click ‘Preview’ to review the cert.

Once the cert is imported, we can go back into ‘Authentication Sources’, Edit our ‘Athens AD’ source and enable SS/TLS option, input password again for the account used and click OK

You can go to the vertical ellipses to the left of the source and ‘Synchronize User Groups’ **This is completely optional** Just wanted to share the feature.

From here you can now structure RBAC under Administration >> Control Panel >> ‘Access Control’.

I refer you to additional VMware documentation on Aria Operations on working with Roles and Scopes.

Cloud Management, VCF Operations, Video

Aria Operations 8.18 Pre-Upgrade Assessment Tool [Video]

sargonkhizeran

When planning for an Aria Operations upgrade there are some encouraged and required steps to go through in order to make for a smooth upgrade. For starters, be sure to read through VMware Docs Release Notes. Please see here for VMware Aria Operations 8.18 Release Notes.

The video embedded here goes through the following VMware KB 369264 in how to upload the Pre-Upgrade Assessment Tool PAK file and review the results.