Career and Virtual Musings
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.
VMware announced the release of Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.18.0 (Release Notes) on July 22, 2024. Along with this release Product Support Pack 1 for 8.18.0 was released (Release Notes). A ‘System Upgrade’ on the appliance to 8.18.0 is required before the Product Support Pack 1 is applied. The Product Support Packs can be thought of as policies that allow new versions of the Aria Cloud Management solutions.
I did previously post a YouTube video of the upgrade process a few months back, it was the same process, feel free to watch that if it helps.
It’s important to review the release notes as there are continued changes in how the Aria LCM Environments will be managed.
From the Aria LCM Appliance homepage options, select Lifecycle Operations >> Settings >> System Upgrade. Once you’ve determined how you want to perform the upgrade, click ‘Check for Upgrade’
The Upgrade option should appear and a validation that there is a newer version available.
Once you’re ready, begin by taking a snapshot by taking it manually or click ‘Create Snapshot’ The following is performing the snapshot through the appliance.
Once the request for snapshot completes, you may have to ‘Check for Upgrade’ again and then click ‘Upgrade’ Next steps will be to confirm you performed a snapshot and then a pre-check.
Give some time, the upgrade should complete successfully, the appliance will need to reboot.
We now head over to the same section Lifecycle Operations >> Settings >> Product Support Pack and we find that Product Support Pack 1 for 8.18.0 is applied and we now can upgrade to the supported versions.
With the Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager appliance there are a few different ways you can load binaries so that you can Install or Update products managed. The VMware to Broadcom transition during the time of this blog is still in place and some customers may be experiencing some minor delays with systems migrating to the Broadcom Support Portal.
Please note before performing any upgrades that you review Release Notes for targeted versions, have a backup plan in place and ensure you’re checking interoperability for single or multi-step upgrades as well as product integrations;
Review the following VMware documentation on Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager – Configure product binaries
One method I was testing in my lab was downloading binaries on a NFS share on my Synology
I created a new folder called NFS and ensured I gave it NFS Permissions, for my lab I opened up a range from a network so that everything as access to it, I suggest you take all security measures with doing this.
After the folder is created, you can choose anyway you would want to upload binaries to the NAS, uploading through browser Drag and Drop or if you happen to have it shared over SMB.
To help with obtaining the path, from within Synology’s FileStation, right-click on the folder and select ‘Properties’
Now that we have our files uploaded, permissions established, we can now go to Aria Suite Lifecycle >> Settings >> Binary Mapping
Select the NFS option and populate the location, select the package and click ‘Add’
**Note that some packages may fail upload due to incompatibility with a support pack or no instance of the product detected.
As a test we will be upgrading Aria Operations 8.16.0 to 8.17.1
After it completes it should now appear as a added binary
When we go to our Environment and select Upgrade for Aria Operations, you can see it recognizes a compatible upgrade.
As part of Broadcom’s simplification of the VMware product portfolio, this included the End of Availability of Perpetual Licensing and SaaS Services. For more details on what products impacted please review the following VCF Blog. One of the products impacted by this decision was our Aria suite (formerly vRealize Suite), which is VMware’s Cloud Management suite. While some customers continue to run Aria on-premises, some customers decided to run Aria on VMware’s Cloud Console to help reduce the time to lifecycle and speed zero-day critical patches.
One product going far back to vRealize Suite was the lifecycle manager component to manage all of the Aria components, integrations, and add-ons.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading, and hope you got some context as to why I continue to focus on Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager to help customers navigate their journey. The following video walks through performing a simple upgrade to the LIfecycle Manager appliance itself.
The Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager is the one-stop shop for managing, configuring, and lifecycling your Aria suite. You can read more on VMware’s site ‘What is VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle‘
In the homelab I deployed the Aria Suite LCM Easy Installer using the Windows Installer. Once the appliance is up, this is a website accessed using FQDN. I’m going to install a custom CA from an internal Active Directory Certificate Service.
Because Aria LCM helps manage all kinds of settings such as DNS, NTP, Product binaries, repositories, and even certificates. We will begin by accessing ‘Locker’ from the Services menu
You will find that Locker is used to maintain Certificates, Passwords, and Licenses. In our case, we will select Certificates >> ‘Generate CSR’ so that we can generate a certificate request.
In my lab, to make things easier, I include multiple products under a single certificate containing FQDNS and IP addresses.
Complete the request
Once ‘Generate’ is clicked, the *pem file should automatically download, from here use any text/code editor to open it.
Copy the full generated certificate from the “——BEGIN all the way to the last EST——-“
The Certificate Template used is a ‘Web Server’ template that I created. I did follow some VMware KBs to assist with creating templates and even using them for vCenter appliances. KB2112009 & KB2112014
Copy the first part in the *.pem file downloaded from the appliance, select the template, and click ‘Submit’
Clicking ‘Download certificate’ with ‘Base 64 encoded’
Once you download the newly minted cert, open it in an editor and below it copy the root cert of your AD domain and below that will be the private key of the Aria CSR we generated earlier.
The following is an example of how it would be laid out. Save the file and next step will be importing it into Aria LCM
Green = Newly minted cert from internal CA
Purple = AD root certificate
Yellow = Private key originated from CSR in the beginning.
Save the file as a *.pem file.
Go back to Aria LCM >> Locker >> Certificates and click ‘Import.
Browse and locate the newly created *.pem file and it should automatically populate the fields, I’m not using a Pass Phrase and will click ‘Import’
Click Import.
Our Cert is in
Next step will be to update the certificate on the actual appliance, up until now this was all generating and adding the cert to a repository.
From Aria LCM ‘My Services’ select ‘Lifecycle Operations’
From the far-right click ‘Settings’ and then ‘Change Certificate’
Click ‘Replace Certificate’
The ‘Replace Certificate’ wizard will appear, click Next.
From the drop-down menu, you will have the certificate imported earlier. Select that and click ‘Next’
The final step will be a Precheck option, click that and give it a moment to run, once it’s Passed, click Next.
The final step was to close out all browser sessions, relaunch a new session, and access the LCM appliance FQDN
