VMware Aria Operations Overview

The VMware Aria Operations clusters consist of a primary node, an optional replica node for high availability, optional data nodes, and optional remote collector nodes.

You can access and interact with the product by using the product UI available on the primary and data nodes. The remote collector nodes do not contain a product UI and are used for data collection only. The product UI is powered by a Tomcat instance that resides across each node but is not load balanced out of the box. You can scale up VMware Aria Operations environment by adding nodes when the environment grows larger.

VMware Aria Operations supports high availability by enabling a replica node for the VMware Aria Operations primary node. A high availability replica node can take over the functions that a primary node provides. When a problem occurs with the primary node, fail-over to the replica node is automatic and requires only two to three minutes of VMware Aria Operations downtime. Data stored on the primary node is always backed up on the replica node. In addition, with high availability activated, the cluster can survive the loss of a data node without losing any data.

Node Role	Functions
Primary Node	It is the initial, required node in the cluster. All other nodes are managed by the primary node. It contains the product UI. In a single-node installation, the primary node performs data collection and analysis as it is the only node where VMware Aria Operations adapters are installed.
Data Node	In larger deployments, only data nodes have adapters installed to perform collection and analysis. It contains the product UI.
Replica Node	To activate high availability, the cluster requires that you convert a data node in to a replica of the primary node. It does not contain product UI.