VMware Aria MCP Skill (vmware-aria) provides AI agents with the ability to interact with VMware Aria Operations (formerly vRealize Operations, renamed VCF Operations in VCF 9.0+), enabling natural-language-driven monitoring, alerting, and capacity planning through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The project was created by Wei Zhou (VMware by Broadcom) and is a community-driven project, not an official VMware product.
Purpose This skill is used for AI-assisted monitoring and capacity planning of vSphere environments. Users can ask AI agents queries in natural language, for example: query the top 10 objects by current CPU consumption, list all CRITICAL alerts and confirm them, predict when a production cluster's memory will be exhausted, find over-provisioned virtual machines and provide right-sizing recommendations, and check whether a virtual machine has anomalies.
Main Capabilities A total of 44 MCP tools are provided, of which 34 are read-only tools and 10 are write tools. Version 2.0 renamed 4 tools so that their names begin with verbs (e.g., findings_list changed to list_findings, fleet_certificate_list changed to list_fleet_certificates, fleet_domain_list changed to list_fleet_domains); the full mapping table is in RELEASE_NOTES.md. Apart from the renames, the tools, parameters, safety gating, and CLI commands remain unchanged. If tool names are referenced in agent prompts, scripts, or ~/.vmware/rules.yaml, they need to be updated; deny rules written using the old names still work under vmware-policy >= 1.18, and vmware-pilot >= 1.13 will translate old names in saved workflows.
Usage Both online installation and offline/air-gapped installation are supported. The project uses the PEP 517 build system (hatchling) and deliberately does not provide setup.py. If, after cloning the source code, you encounter a setup.py or setup.cfg not found error, it means the pip version is lower than 21.3 and cannot perform an editableinstall with a non-setuptools backend; editable mode is only for developer convenience, and is not required to run the tools. For truly air-gapped hosts, you can build a wheel on a networked machine and copy it over; the target machine does not need network access. After installation, add the MCP configuration in ~/.claude.json to use it. v1.5.15+ uses the single-command form vmware-aria mcp; the older vmware-aria-mcp console script is still retained for compatibility. If you must use uvx --from vmware-aria vmware-aria mcp (without installing) and encounter invalid peer certificate: UnknownIssuer behind an enterprise TLS proxy, you can set UV_NATIVE_TLS=true or switch to the recommended vmware-aria mcp form.
Authentication and Security Aria Operations uses vRealizeOpsToken authentication; the token has a 6-hour sliding validity period (extended on each call, according to the official specification), and the client automatically reacquires it 60 seconds before expiration; the validity field is an expiration timestamp expressed in epoch milliseconds, not a duration. Passwords are loaded from environment variables or a .env file, and are never read from config.yaml. Every MCP tool call and every CLI command that reaches Aria is audited and recorded to ~/.vmware/audit.db through vmware-policy; CLI write operations (alert acknowledgment/cancellation, alert annotations, alert definition management, report generation/deletion, resource maintenance start/end) are also appended to ~/.vmware-aria/audit.log. API responses are sanitized (control characters removed, limited to 500 characters) to prevent prompt injection. MCP destructive writes (alert acknowledgment/cancellation, alert definition and report deletion, maintenance start/end) require a confirm parameter (default false): when confirm=true is not provided, the blast_radius of what would be changed is returned without making any changes; when blocking conditions exist (for example, the resource is already under maintenance) or fields are unreadable, confirm=true is rejected. confirmed is a deprecated alias. TLS verification is enabled by default; for private CAs, set SSL_CERT_FILE to a certificate bundle containing the CA; verify_ssl: false is only for isolated, self-signed lab environments.
Use cases and limitations Intended for vSphere administrators and operations personnel using AI agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, and Goose for monitoring, alert handling, and capacity planning. Limitations include: unofficial VMware product with no official support; requires an Aria Operations environment and a valid token; write operations are restricted by safety gating; some version compatibility needs attention (for example, when older installations share rules.yaml, vmware-policy >= 1.18.2 is required). For more official resources, refer to the REST API, SDK, and CLI tools on developer.broadcom.com (PowerCLI 9.1 includes VCF Operations commands).
