Managing infrastructure and apps in a multi-cloud and multi-technology environment is complex.  And managing overall cloud spend, resource utilization, and application performance, security and compliance across different clouds can prove difficult, problematic and can potentially lead to overspending, inefficiencies and increased risk.  And while multi-cloud environments can open up a host of possibilities, organizations going down that path must also be aware of the challenges that come with it, and they need to be ready to control costs, ensure performance, and manage consistent security policies across these diverse and distributed environments.

There is no shortage of clouds at the ready: from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and more.  And then there's private clouds, on-premises, edge, and telco cloud. 

Multi-cloud introduces new complexities, and with it, new management challenges that require a new method of thinking and a new approach that can cut across management disciplines and cloud platforms. 

Introducing VMware Aria, VMware's next superstar.

A new demonstration of VMware Aria was just released within one of the latest VMware multi-cloud briefings.  This is a great place to start to become more familiar with VMware Aria, the latest VMware multi-cloud offering that helps you track, monitor and migrate workloads across all cloud and on-premises environments.  Watch and learn more:

VMware took great pride in unveiling VMware Aria Hub powered by VMware Aria Graph at both VMware Explore US earlier this summer, and again at VMware Explore Barcelona last month.  Attendees quickly gravitated towards the offering, for good reason.

While there are a few recognized product names mentioned in relation to Aria, let's be clear, Aria is something new and different.  It is much more than just a rebranding or repackaging of existing products such as VMware vRealize or CloudHealth.  There are existing VMware technology underpinnings found within Aria, as well as additional technologies such as Guardrails, Migration and Business Insights, combined to create Aria Hub (formerly known as Project Ensemble).

In this most recent VMware Multi-Cloud Briefing video, VMware introduced a preview of current and upcoming functionality of VMware ARIA hub.  There are two components, the front end, Hub; and the back end, Graph. 

VMware Aria Hub is a multi-cloud management platform with integrations across the VMware Aria portfolio, providing centralized views and controls to manage your entire multi-cloud environment.  It helps an organization discover cloud resources, including applications, users and configurations, and more easily understand the associated dependencies.  It also provides centralized administration, helping you manage applications, accounts, roles, projects and workflows across multi-cloud environments through a single interface.

The multi-cloud management platform also serves as a foundation for a new set of value-added solution services that customers can leverage to support strategic cross-cloud use cases.  End-to-end solutions reside on VMware Aria Hub, and provide workflows integrated with multiple tools and domains.

Under the hood, the platform is powered by VMware Aria Graph, a cloud-scale graph-based data store technology that provides a near real-time map of applications and clouds with management insights from your existing VMware Aria solutions as well as federated third-party management tools.  It captures the resources and relationships of a multi-cloud environment.  VMware says its technology is highly scalable, scaling up to hundreds of millions of nodes -- a requirement for a multi-cloud environment.  The datastore captures the many-to-many relationships for dependency mapping and also enables viewing of historical configurations, critical for rootcause analysis.  VMware Aria Graph also provides event-based collection, supporting a high rate of change.  Based on a federated and modular architecture, the graph-based datastore enables aggregation of data from any source.  And its plug-and-play approach is extensible, as it allows you to layer in data from third-party tools.

Check out the Aria Hub home page.

Here, an infrastructure administrator can do a lot of things.  You can see all the environments you have within your organization: where they're located, create information around MTTR cost availability, as well as do things such as screen scores for carbon footprint.  If you want to explore the inventory within all of your environments, you can leverage the search and explore area and see all of the different environments that are plugged into the system.  You can click within an SDDC then into a cluster, then down to a host level and at every level you can see different information around things like memory utilization, as well as cost delivery, and security configuration.  If you drill down into a VM on a particular host, you can see information specific to that object, such as CPU demand, as well as delivery information to understand who deployed this, what application it's associated with, and how long it's been there.

Multi-Cloud Migration Services

Perhaps one of the coolest features in Aria, the migration service. The Aria migration service provides you with the ability to scope, assess, plan, and execute a migration from an on premises environment to VMC on AWS.  By scoping the environment, you can remove workloads that you don't want to have as a part of the migration. 

It can calculate the total cost of ownership of a particular migration set and it will show the number of hosts that it would take as well as total core memory and storage, as well as potential cost savings that could be achieved.  You can save the assessment and share it with the team and with leadership. 

Once you are ready to go, you can start the planning process.  Analyze all of the workloads and break them down into bundles.  Select one of the bundles and start to plan it in four easy steps.  First, going through an approval process, then selecting which landing zone or SDDC you'd like to migrate these workloads to, and then you can edit the migration pipeline that it will create for you to add business steps that you might need in order to successfully execute the migration.  Then, you can schedule the migration against your maintenance windows across as many days as you need in order to achieve your business outcomes.  You can then save the plan and then migrate that bundle.  When the migration is complete, you'll have full visibility of the execution of the migration, and can see the benefits of migrating these workloads from on premises to the VMC.

How to get started with Aria Hub

Register for the free tier of Aria Hub that enables you to inventory, map, filter and search resources from vCenter Servers, Kubernetes Cluster, and public clouds like AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Try out the VMware hands-on lab "VMware Aria Hub (HOL-2301-08-ISM)" (follow the link and search for "aria")

Test-drive Aria Hub via VMware Pathfinder

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