Unless you have been hiding in a cave, you saw a lot of news these past few weeks about changes at VMware – both in people and products – after the Broadcom acquisition. In this post I do not want to make comments or reflect on my past at VMware, I think it is more important to help you with product news.

Since the Aria products are my thing, I feel I need to make some observations here.They go from obvious to less so… All info here comes from official documentation, only sometimes it is well hidden…

SaaS versions are gone. For all Aria products. Only Aria for Logs still exists in a cloud version in Tanzu Insight weirdly enough.

There are no standalone versions available anymore, so you cannot buy Aria Suite or vCloud suite anymore. VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) includes Operations Advanced and Operations for Logs. VMware vCloud Foundation (VCF) includes the same plus Operations for Networks (vRNI) and Automation. The Aria products in VCF are all enterprise versions. So this means the product you need determines what subscription you need to buy. Need Automation for example? You need VCF.

Less obvious is what is happening to the management packs for Operations, a.k.a True Visibility Suite. The good news is there are no licenses necessary anymore. Objects such as switches, firewalls, databases, do not count anymore , since the packs are now part of VVF or VCF subscriptions.

Vsphere Foundation (VVF) includes:

• the Virtualization and Container MP (Citrix Apps and desktops, IBM HMC, IBM PowerVC, Microsoft Hyper-V, Tanzu Application Service, Nutanix).
• Networking Devices MP (Arista EOS, Cisco Catalyst, Cisco MDS, F5, Cisco Nexus, Palo Alto).
• Connectors! This is surprising. You now get all the connectors to import data from Nagios XI, Microsoft SCOM, Oracle Enterprise Manager, ServiceNow, SolarWinds.

vCloud Foundation (VCF) includes:

• all of the above
• Applications (MS IIS, Apache Tomcat, SAP, JBoss)
• Databases (MS SQL server, MongoDB, MySQL, Postgress, SAP HANA, Oracle, Apache Hadoop).

This is tremendous news! But I hear you ask “what about the hardware packs that where included for free before?”. Well, most of them are end-of-life. See the KB article with the announcement. All the EMC storage packs, for example, are replaced by the Dell ESA solution. For other solutions it is suggested customers use the content builder (a.k.a. Management Pack Builder) to roll there own. For other management packs, such as Horizon, there is no definitive answer yet.

Some interesting posts on these changes from William Lam and the VMware Cloud Management blog.

As always I look forward to your feedback. At comdivision we are ready to help you implement these changes. You can contact me here.