This post compares the Aria products included with the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) licences from VMware by Broadcom.

In the VCF license, you get all the Aria products in Enterprise versions, meaning Aria Suite Enterprise.

This includes:

• Lifecyclemanager

• VMware Identity manager (Workspace ONE)

• Aria Automation (former vRealize Automation)

• Aria Operations ( former vRealize Operations Manager)

• Aria Operations for Logs ( former vRealize LogInsight)

• Aria Operations for Networks (former vRealize Network Insight)

In the VVF license there is Aria Suite Standard.

This includes:

• Lifecyclemanager

• Aria Operations

• Aria Operations for Logs

So what is the difference, and what do you gain with VCF?

Moving from a VVF licence to VCF gives you the VCF functionality and the full Aria Suite Enterprise product set.

Operations Manager and Log Insight may already be familiar. What makes VCF interesting here is the centralised lifecycle management plus licences for Aria Automation and Network Insight, which were expensive separate products before this change.

Aria Automation integrates with VCF and supports Ansible, Terraform, GitHub, IPAM, Tanzu/Kubernetes, and more. It includes a separate orchestration engine for workflows and Cloud Templates (blueprints), allowing you to deploy applications to a private or public cloud from one portal. You can run it as a service in VMware Cloud or in your datacenter.

Network Insight uses NetFlow to show how traffic moves through your datacenter. You may find that 90% is east-west traffic and only 10% is north-south. It also shows source, destination, and port information for a VM or group of VMs. You can use that data to define application-specific microsegmentation rules in the distributed firewall.