VMware By Broadcom has announced the End of Availability (EoA) of the VMware Aria SaaS services, including VMware Aria Automation SaaS, as of February 2024. VMware will continue to support customers currently using VMware Aria SaaS services until the end of their subscription term. See VMware End Of Availability of Perpetual Licensing and SaaS Services.
This was part of the new dramatic offer lineup simplification and licensing model announced on December 11th, 2023. It stated that VMware, now part of Broadcom, is simplifying its product portfolio and transitioning to a subscription-based licensing model. This change aims to provide customers with continuous innovation, faster time to value, and predictable investments. The new lineup features two main offerings: VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vSphere Foundation, designed to meet the needs of various customer sizes and include enhanced support services. The move away from perpetual licenses is intended to streamline operations and better support digital transformations. For more details, visit VMware’s announcement.
Due to this portfolio simplification, many VMware software solutions will only be offered as part of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF). They will not be available for purchase as standalone point solutions anymore.
VMware Aria Automation 8.x in particular is only available now within the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack.
VMware by Broadcom will continue to offer active SaaS support through the duration of customers’ support contracts. In the future, at the time of renewal, customers can work with their VMware representative or partner to align their future requirements with VMware’s updated portfolio of offerings.
This is great at so many levels, even for us internally, since we are back to having one solution form factor to focus on, as opposed to before, when we had a SaaS form factor and an on-prem form factor, not to mention that we had some features and capabilities that were SaaS-only to encourage customers to move to SaaS back then which is not the case anymore. Now we have all the features in one form factor and that is Aria Automation on-premises. Of course this also applies to other solutions like VMware Aria Operations.
As an example, Cloud Consumption Interface (CCI) was available in Aria Automation SaaS only and now it’s available on-prem as of Aria Automation 8.16.2 (Tech Blog) to provide a simple and secure self-service consumption of all the Kubernetes-based, desired state IaaS APIs available in the vSphere platform, enabling customers to develop, deploy and manage Modern Applications with increased agility, flexibility and modern techniques on vSphere while maintaining control of their vSphere infrastructure.
Starting with VCF 5.2, which is planned to be released around the July time frame, Aria products like Automation, Operations, Operations for logs and Operations for Network will ship as part of the VCF release cycle from now on and more in line with the VCF quarterly releases.
We will announce tons of net new capabilities and platform enhancements, so stay tuned.
Until then, stay safe and fabulous .
