On the 29th July, patch 2 for Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.12 was released. The release notes can be found here: VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.18 Patch 2 Release Notes

Unusually, on the 6th August, patch 3 was then released. Pretty soon after hey? Release notes for patch 3 can be seen here: VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.18 Patch 3 Release Notes

What You Need To Know

This is a great example of ‘always read the release notes before applying!’ For those that have rushed into applying patch 2 you may notice something you were not expecting. The Aria suite is completely decoupled from SDDC Manager. VCF awareness? Gone. The release notes make a clear statement

“Apply this patch to upgrade your VMware Aria infrastructure to VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0. This patch does not provide any new features or fixes. If you do not plan to upgrade to VCF 9.0, do not apply the patch. For VMware Aria components that are deployed as part of VCF 5.x environments, applying the VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.18 Patch 2 will remove the integration with SDDC Manager because it is no longer needed in VCF 9.0.”

So how do you revert if you accidently applied Patch 2? Good question. Restore from backup? Maybe, but if you check SDDC Manager you will see no entries for passwords, since they have been removed. So does the patch make a call to SDDC Manager from Lifecycle Manager? It could do, looks like it, but unconfirmed. If you have applied Patch 2, you appear to be pretty much stuck until you upgrade to VCF 9.

In my opinion, a few customers have been caught out as Patch 3 was released so soon and has a revised statement.

“Decouples VCF aware mode based deployments with SDDC Manager. This occurs only if VMware Aria Operations 8.x is upgraded to 9.0 or SDDC Manager is upgraded to 9.0.”

Tread carefully people and read the release notes!