Broadcom organised a briefing for vExperts on the next iteration of VCF v5.2 announced today. Again this illustrates one of the many advantages of the vExpert program; product managers taking almost 3 hours to explain and show new features! A big thank you Corey Romero for organising this.

In this post I will go over some of the novelties in Aria Operations 8.18 when it goes GA next month. Please note that these features might still change before final GA! The present version launched this month is 8.17.2.

Console

One of the main enhancements is the new console experience. Not only is there a new Overview startpage, but the main menu has been overhauled again! Time will tell if this makes more sense. I know I will find it even harder to remember menu items…

The grouping is more logical, you will not find data sources in Inventory anymore, but under Administration.

Diagnostics

Diagnostics is a new section, it is more config-based. It looks and feels more like Skyline Health.

Where you had already better certificate management in previous Operations versions, if you enabled the VMware Infrastructure Health management pack, it is part of Diagnostics now. You can check expiry dates and more.

With the new Diagnostics section a whole lot of alerts have been deprecated. They are still there in this version but have a warning in their name.

License Management

A cool new feature is centralised license management. You will be able to enter your entitlements here and do things like see license usage over time.

Compliance

On the Compliance side – one of my favourite topics as you might know – there are some new compliance packs and updates coming. A big novelty is Configuration Drift. You will now be able to use a vCenter as golden image for your environment. After that you get warnings about drifts from that standard! Configuration Drifts and Certificates are right on the home page in Overview.