By: Paul Turner, VP Products, VMware Cloud Foundation Division
Over the past two years, VMware has been on a journey to simplify its portfolio and transition from a perpetual license to a subscription model, helping customers of all sizes gain more value from their investments in our solutions. On December 11, 2023, we commenced the next chapter in VMware’s mission to enable global enterprises to embrace private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments with the announcement of a dramatic simplification of our product portfolio.
We radically streamlined our cloud infrastructure and management products by consolidating our focus on two core offerings: VMware Cloud Foundation, our flagship enterprise-class hybrid cloud solution, and the new VMware vSphere Foundation, an enterprise-grade workload platform that integrates vSphere with intelligent operations management for our mid-sized and smaller customers.
This simplification strategy extends to our VMware Aria cloud management solutions. First, we’ve incorporated the full breadth of Aria’s functionality in VMware Cloud Foundation. Aria simplifies customer deployment, adoption, and management of the key VMware Cloud Foundation capabilities that transform your datacenter into a private cloud. With Aria, you can automate the delivery of infrastructure and applications services, predict, prevent, and troubleshoot performance issues, ensure maximum utilization of resources at minimal cost, and fortify compliance and governance to reduce risk across your cloud environments.
In addition to the incorporation of Aria, we’ve dramatically increased the value of VMware Cloud Foundation by reducing our previous subscription list prices by half and adding higher support service levels including enhanced support for solution activation and lifecycle management. The new vSphere Foundation includes Aria Operations and Operations for Logs to provide the best performance, availability, and efficiency with greater visibility and insights.
Second, the simplification strategy provides a consistent infrastructure and management stack across all the ways that customers can consume VMware Cloud Foundation: direct from VMware or via our partners, such as the channel, hyperscaler partners, or managed service providers. To deliver this consistent deployment and operational model for customers, we are no longer making the Aria offerings available for purchase as SaaS. They are available only as components of VMware vSphere Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation. This end of availability covers the standalone Aria SaaS services (e.g., Aria Operations Cloud) as well as the suite offerings such as VMware Aria Cloud Universal and VMware vCloud Suite Subscription. This change also enables our partners to build out a set of SaaS management services on top of VMware Cloud Foundation, delivering significant incremental value on top of the functionality provided by Aria Operations and Aria Automation. And, with the bring-your-own-subscription license option, customers can move their license to a cloud service provider of choice to utilize their value-added SaaS services on top of VMware Cloud Foundation.
The incorporation of Aria as a core component of VMware vSphere Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation helps simplify and streamline how customers and partners realize value from our offerings to support digital transformation. This value will flow from continuous innovation, faster time to value, and predictable investments. We are committed to your success with VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Aria, and believe this new simplification journey will help you achieve that success faster and more fully.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What are the changes in the Aria SaaS product portfolio?
A. Customers no longer have the option to purchase the Aria offerings as a standalone product or as a SaaS product. The Aria cloud management capabilities are available only as components of VMware vSphere Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation, which are sold for deployment on-premises or on certain public cloud providers including VMware Cloud on AWS. Existing Aria SaaS subscriptions will continue through the end of their term. At time of renewal, customers should purchase VMware vSphere Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation.
Q: What products and bundles are impacted by this new policy?
A. See the list on this VMware KB article
Q. Why are you making these changes? As a customer, how do I benefit?
A. As a core component of VMware Cloud Foundation, customers now can purchase a single infrastructure and management stack with a consistent deployment and operational model. In addition, we’ve reduced our previous VMware Cloud Foundation subscription list prices by half and added higher support service levels.
Q. I’m a partner – how does this Aria simplification help my business?
A. As part of VMware vSphere Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation, we are able to make Aria available to our customers in a consistent manner across all our various routes to market – direct from VMware or via our channel, OEM, or hyper-scaler partners, or as a managed service. Partners have told us they are excited to build additional SaaS services on top of our offerings to provide significant incremental value to our joint customers.
Q. What is the timing of the end of availability of the Aria SaaS offerings?
A. Aria SaaS SKUs have been end of availability (EoA) as of 12/12/2023. Purchasing Aria a la carte is not possible as of the EoA date.
Q. I am currently using Aria SaaS. What happens to me? What happens to existing service subscriptions such as Aria Cloud Universal?
A. You will be able to continue to use your Aria SaaS licenses until the end of your subscription term, after which we will help you to transition to VMware vSphere Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation.
Q. I am in the middle of onboarding Aria SaaS services. If Aria SaaS is no longer available, should I continue to onboard them now? Whom should I reach out to if I have questions about what to do going forward?
A. If you are currently in the process of onboarding to Aria SaaS then you will continue to be supported in your onboarding and your SaaS subscription will continue through the end of its term. At the end of your subscription term, we will work with you to transition you to VMware vSphere Foundation or VMware Cloud Foundation and help move your Aria SaaS to an on-premises deployment. If you have not commenced your onboarding, we encourage you to transition to an on-premises deployment of Aria via VMware vSphere Foundation or VMware Cloud Foundation. Please reach out to your account team for more information on how your onboarding or transition will be supported.
Q: Can I use Aria to manage public clouds?
A. If you want to manage native public clouds with VMware Aria you must purchase VMware Cloud Foundation and deploy it either on-premises or directly on a public cloud using the license portability to VMware validated hybrid cloud endpoints running VMware Cloud Foundation. If you have an existing Aria SaaS subscription (either a standalone service, e.g., Aria Operations Cloud, or Aria Cloud Universal) you can continue to use it for public cloud management until the end of its term. In addition, for VMware Cloud on AWS, the VMware Cloud on AWS: Advanced offering includes Aria Suite Advanced for use with customer-managed SDDCs and is available for net new purchases and renewals.
