Unless you have been living under a rock for the past months, you are aware that Broadcom changed the licensing for its products. This post will not open that particular can of worms… I do however want to point out some important pitfalls!

Solution license keys

The VCF and VVF product families now come with a single license key for all components. Read that again – a single key for everything. For VCF the license is called “VMware vSphere 8 Enterprise Plus for VCF“. It has everything: vCenter, Aria products,… as of VCF 5.1.1. Only vSAN licenses are separate. More info in this support doc: VMware Cloud Foundation and vSphere Foundation Solution License Key (Article ID: 319282).

I had a customer recently who ran into trouble with Aria Operations (more in the next paragraph) because they also added separate licenses for vCenter and other products.

Aria Operations

In the new releases of Aria (VCF Operations) 8.18 and above you will now find a new license management tab. It now includes all your licenses, not just Operations! You can add licenses right from this interface. Why is this important? It shows your licenses in a nice high-level interface (under Subscriptions); you can organize them in views, dashboards,… This allows you to optimize usage and track compliance easily. But you might also have heard that VCF Operations is becoming a more crucial management interface in VCF 9! This will be THE interface for license management, so it’s worth getting familiar with it now.

What are your thoughts or challenges with VCF Operations? Especially moving to v9? Let me know in the comments or on my contact page at comdivision.