VMware by Broadcom has published multiple articles detailing the end of availability for most of its SaaS services, particularly the Aria Suite of products – this is all in the light of the dramatic portfolio simplification announcements from VMware by Broadcom at the start of the year, focusing on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF). This blog post explores the potential implications of the changes and outlines recommendations on what to do next.
What are the changes to VMware Aria SaaS offerings?
The most recent communication sent to service users has advised that, effective from 6th December 2024, VMware by Broadcom will cease providing the VMware Aria SaaS Suite and standalone Aria SaaS services (formerly known as vRealize Operations, vRealize Automation, and vRealize Network Insight).
The Aria SaaS offerings were made End-of-Availability (EoA) as of 12th December 2023, meaning it is no longer possible to purchase the SaaS services. The expectation was that these SaaS versions would continue to run and be supported until the end of their existing term. However, customers have now been issued with formal notification, in line with customer agreements, that the Aria SaaS offering will cease from 6th December 2024.
This updated guidance encourages you to move your Aria Suite components to on-premises and we would recommend the same.
You can only get the Aria Suite (on-premises) by purchasing VCF or VVF offerings. It is no longer available as a standalone product. The Aria products available depend on the VCF or VVF offering purchased.
Table 1 – Aria Product Availability
(ENTERPRISE)
(ENTERPRISE)
(ADVANCED)
What should I do?
It ultimately depends on your position, but if you use any of the Aria Suite components within your environment you need to understand the impacts that service disruption could bring.
- Do you use Aria Operations for monitoring of your infrastructure? What would happen to business services if this monitoring was lost? Will SLAs potentially be impacted?
- Do you use Aria Automation for virtual machine deployment or the running of complex workflows? How will business operations be impacted? Will people and teams be under pressure to perform these same tasks manually? What is the cost of human error to the business?
- Do you use Aria Operations for Logs for log management? What are the impacts to security functions without these logs? How will troubleshooting and incident investigation be impacted by the loss of these logs?
If you realise that there will be an impact to the business, you will need to quickly start planning the transition activities. You should consider:
- Data Analysis: Assess the content in use with your SaaS platform (Workflows, Dashboards, Cloud Templates) and understand how many workloads and environments are currently being managed. Complete an exercise to identify the features being used within the existing products and how they align with the on-premises offerings. Fully understand the service that is currently being provided to the business and if that same service will need to be provided after a transition.
- Migration Strategy: Plan how to transition from existing setups to the new model, understand which options are available with the product sets to help with this. Start to understand how you can maintain business continuity and reduce the impact to the business during transition.
- Timeline: Act promptly. We don’t fully know the impact of the potential decline in service availability, so you should have an on-premises deployment in place to mitigate any risk to your business and its operations; monitoring, SLAs, troubleshooting.
- Training and Support: Assess support and maintenance options and prepare teams for the changes and provide necessary training.
Once you understand these key points you can recognise the risk for your cloud management platform.
If you have SaaS services but have not yet started to onboard into the SaaS product then the immediate recommendation would be to stop and consider the on-premises alternative. If you have Cloud Universal licenses these should entitle you to deploy on-premises and you should then focus your effort there.
What does this mean architecturally?
The SaaS offerings provided a centralised and managed environment that was able to provide service to single or multiple geographically distributed environments with a small amount of operational overhead. With an on-premises deployment of the products, your options ultimately depend on the service that needs to be provided into the business, but you will now need to manage the Aria product appliances yourself within your environments.
If you have one of the VMware Cloud solutions, such as VMware Cloud on AWS, you should reach out to Broadcom support and your Broadcom account manager to see if they would support the deployment of the Aria products directly onto these hyperscaler solutions. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find any publicly available wording that says it would be supported.
If you have on-premises data centres only, with no VMware Cloud solution other than the SaaS products, then a deployment model in line with the relevant VMware Validated Solution (VVS) for VCF would be a strong starting point. However, as there are countless real-world scenarios it would be recommended to enter a workshop and design phase to identify the most appropriate deployment scenario.
Of course, the management and deployment of the on-premises products is just one factor. Lots of users of these products have focused large amounts of effort into platform customisation, such as Dashboards, Workflows and Cloud Templates – these would need to be independently assessed and migrated based on each product’s capability.
The following outlines the VMware Validated Solutions, the products they include, and example data centre scenarios.
Table 2 – VMware Validated Solutions
Aria Product
VMware Aria Automation (vRealize Automation)
Single Data Centre Guidance
- Deploy a three-node VMware Aria Automation cluster.
- Requires an external load balancer for the cluster.
Multiple Data Centre Guidance
- Deploy a three-node VMware Aria Automation cluster in the primary data centre.
- Requires an external load balancer for the cluster.
Note: Although there is a VMware Aria Automation Extensibility proxy, it is different from the SaaS Cloud Extensibility Proxy, it is more like the Cloud Proxy. Currently this is not included in the VVS but could still be implemented to provide improved performance/connectivity for vSphere Cloud Accounts across data centres.
Aria Product
VMware Aria Operations (vRealize Operations)
Single Data Centre Guidance
- Deploy a three-node VMware Aria Operations analytics cluster.
- Deploy a group of two VMware Cloud Proxies.
- Requires an external load balancer for the cluster.
Multiple Data Centre Guidance
- Deploy a three-node VMware Aria Operations analytics cluster in the primary data centre.
- Deploy a group of two VMware Cloud Proxies in each data centre.
- Requires an external load balancer for the cluster.
Aria Product
VMware Aria Operations for Logs (vRealize Log Insight)
Single Data Centre Guidance
- Deploy a three-node VMware Aria Operations for Logs cluster.
- Utilise integrated load balancer.
Multiple Data Centre Guidance
- Deploy a three-node VMware Aria Operations for Logs cluster in each data centre.
- Utilise integrated load balancer in each cluster.
Aria Product
VMware Aria Operations for Networks (vRealize Network Insight)
Single Data Centre Guidance
- Deploy a single VMware Aria Operations for Networks Platform Node appliance.
- Deploy a single VMware Aria Operations for Networks Collector Node appliance.
Multiple Data Centre Guidance
- Deploy a single VMware Aria Operations for Networks Platform Node appliance in the primary data centre.
- Deploy a single VMware Aria Operations for Networks Collector Node appliance in each data centre.
Where can I access further information and support?
In addition to the support of your VMware account manager, an official Broadcom Partner like Xtravirt should be able to provide you with the additional clarity and support you need. Xtravirt has extensive knowledge in the deployment of the Aria Suite, both SaaS and on-premises, across single and geographically distributed data centres. We can help by providing workshops to discuss the extent to which you will be impacted by the end of availability of the VMware Aria SaaS services, and we can help construct a plan to migrate to the on-premises equivalent. Please get in touch to find out more.
Xtravirt Managed Services (XMS) also provide ‘Cross-Cloud Managed Availability’, delivering proactive and efficient monitoring across your diverse IT landscape, maintaining seamless operations in the face of complexity.
References
- Dramatic Simplification of VMware Aria as part of VMware Cloud Foundation – VMware Cloud Management
- Amid subscription push, VMware killed a SaaS product • The Register
- What is VMware Aria Universal Suite (formerly known as VMware vRealize Cloud Universal)
- VMware End of Availability of Perpetual Licensing and SaaS Services (96168)
- VMware End of Availability of Perpetual Licensing and SaaS Services – VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog
- What’s in the new VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) offers? (williamlam.com)