Vsphere 5 Enterprise Plus License Crack
Pamula Harrison
Since the announcement of the two new VMware offerings: VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) at the end of 2023, I have been trying to wrap my head around the new offers and to better help me understand the next level of details, I have put together several diagrams across the various offers and applicable add-ons that can be purchased.
After sharing these diagrams internally, the feedback was extremely positive and I thought I would also share these diagrams with our users and partners who might still have questions around the new offers. I have also created a short URL which you can access by going to vmwa.re/skus
Lastly, I know many of our users currently consume our VMware Validated Solutions (VVS) and I thought it would also be useful to include a mapping of the available and planned VVS for the VCF offering.
A: No. In addition to them being available as add-ons to the new VCF, VVF, vSphere Standard and vSphere Essentials SKUs, customers can purchase VCDR, VMware Ransomware Recovery, and SRM separately to protect existing vSphere and VCF environments. They can also purchase VCDR and VMware Ransomware Recovery separately for VMware Cloud on AWS and Google Cloud VMware Engine environments. VMware Cloud DR with VMware Ransomware Recovery is the best way to deliver cyber resiliency for vSphere and VCF environments."
I'm being told the same... SRM is ONLY available with VCF and VVF, and
NOT with VMware vSphere Standard (VVS). Pointed them to this blog and they told me this is "Not Official" VMware info, and it is not reflected anywhere on VMware's site.. Sigh...
There'll be a migration path for those who've already onboarded, I don't have the details as some of that is still being worked on from technical standpoint. If vSphere+/VCF+ customer hasn't onboarded, you have a few more options which you can reach out to your account team for further assistance.
Hello William, thank you for the informative article. We have a vsphere enterprise+ cluster and use vDS / LACP LinkAgg as well as DRS/HA/SVMotion with SAN storage connected via NFSv3. We don't need aria, srm and vsan. Which license modell fits our needs?
I am wondering that there is no Add-On for TAS (Tanzu Application Services) and TKGi (Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated)? AFAIK the majority of enterprise customers still preferes these solutions instead of TAP/TKG.
Ist it also possible to use the VCF subscription without actually using VCF? Please correct me if I am wrong, but you just need NSX DFW and some additional Add-Ons you have to choose the VCF subscription?
If you want to get the benefits of SRE Essentials which is included in Select Support for the VCF offer, you will need to deploy the full VCF stack including SDDC Manager. While nothing stops you from deploying a subset, it wouldn't be considered "VCF" and hence you wouldn't qualify for SRE Essential services (which is included in offer) is my understanding
To get the full benefits of the new VCF offer including SRE support services, you'll need to deploy the full VCF stack (as prescribed). While nothing stops you from deploying a subset, it wouldn't be considered "VCF" and hence you wouldn't qualify for SRE Essential services (which is included in offer) is my understanding. I don't know the specifics about Aria Universal ... so best you reach out to your account team to dive deeper into your specific entitlements, as there maybe some transition programs/etc. that is unique to each customer based on their purchases.
If you haven't already had this cleared up, going forward the Aria Suite products will only be deployable on-premises. The SaaS versions were announced as being end of availability. If you're already running in SaaS, you can continue to use your instance(s) until the end of your term. At that point you will need to migrate to an on-premises deployment. You will have a 30 day grace period (60 if you plan to purchase VCF/VVF) to migrate off, and your account team can nominate you for resources to assist with the migration if necessary. You can review this blog for more information: -simplification-of-vmware-aria-as-part-of-vmware-cloud-foundation.html
Great work William. Great post.
Therefore, in order to implement a Hyperconverged Infrastructure we will have to propose at least the VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF). From what is indicated the solutions:
VMware vSphere Standard (VVS)
VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit (VVEP)
vSAN is only available in VVF/VCF as clearly shown in the post ? Depending on raw capacity required, you'll need to purchase vSAN add-on which is sold as 8TiB per CPU Socket. If you have more questions, please reach out to your account/sales team who can help with specific questions/quotes.
This is really dissappointing to remove the flexibility to start with Standard, then later migrate to vSAN requiring a full lift to a suite of Foundation tidbits that are likely to not be used (for a small enterprise). Kind of encourages continued use of traditional SAN cost wise.
"8. What is considered raw storage capacity?
A. Raw capacity refers to the aggregate that is claimed by all the hosts that comprise the vSAN cluster. Cache capacity is excluded from raw storage capacity. Note, in the OSA the caching devices never contributed to capacity. In ESA, there are no dedicated caching devices."
Completely concur that vSAN is a superior product. I am leading a migration to VMware from HV right now, before Christmas I was 100% in the vSAN camp. Since the licensening changes and forcing a requirement to license Foundation or Cloud Foundation, the maths changed a lot. TL/DR version is we went with traditional SAN and VMware Standard at just less than $0.5M for a small 3 datacenter config over 5 years. Percent wise vSAN was 24% more, so as long as your traditional SAN is being replaced no more quickly than every 4 years, you are ahead to avoid vSAN. I would argue that although vSAN is the superior product, I am convinced its not 24% better by many dimensions of measurement.
Back of the napkin, I've got 3 small datacenters where I need 100TiB of shared high performance storage in each site. A "to the door and mostly implemented" 100TiB all flash SAN is just about $250k for me. Licensing vSAN, adding (as per the build tool for ESA) relevant minimum number of NVMe disks to get the same storage in a 6 host cluster is $408k more, everything else is like for like. That's with dual CPU sockets and 16 core processors.
For us the math is about replacing that all flash SAN every 5-7 years versus vSAN becoming more of an OPEX conversation. I have been unable to justify it on performance, money wise, or quite frankly risk wise. Because I'm buying into VMware clean right now, and with it entirely a greenfield license, its easy to watch how Broadcom adjusts to market dynamics over the lifetime of my new traditional 3 SAN's, and maybe we make the jump once the pricing has rationalized a bit.
I'm not bashing Broadcom at all. I see what they are doing, it makes sense. They are still the market leader technology wise. Their value proposition was extremely good, Broadcom have corrected that to just be OK to good. I feel really sorry for organizations that have 24 and 32 core CPU's all over the place, the cost increases are nearly exponential. I suspect you will see companies that can't move away from VMware suddenly doing a run on higher frequency lower core-count processors here in the next 12-18 months!
Do your own detailed math, don't leave anything out. Also, I feel sorry for William, he's done a great job of pointing to all the resources, yet ppl are still posting in this thread things that have already been linked, haha! Keep up the good work William!
Thanks for the post, William! It seems to me that Aria Enterprise / vSphere Enterprise Plus customers will need to upgrade to VCF to retain Enterprise functionality in the Aria Suite or downgrade Aria functionality to Standard and go with VVF. Is that true?
Not William here of course ? But I've had some of the same questions as current vSphere+ customers with basic VROps, so I've been looking at this a lot. I do believe you're correct, the Aria Automation piece being the key component between the two. I suspect our vSphere+ w/ Aria Ops licenses will become VVF and we'll be set for our needs.
Where I do find difficulties comparing apple to apple is the NSX capability of VCF. In fact it does not have "NSX Enterprise Plus", since that had overlay + security (DFW+GW), we can call it NSX Enterprise Plus wo DFW/GW. In fact this is a complete change in there, sincs NSX security only - which came out 1-2 years ago - is gone, only NSX overlay only stays in VCF.
Yes, that'll be addressed by our Edge Division and the details will be shared once its available. I've certainly received my fair share of inquiries both internal/external and will also provide similiar diagrams when ready.
Yes, there's been some update in this space depending on your use case. Its best that you reach out to your account team for the latest options, but basically if you've got Factory Automation use cases, then you can look at the new Edge Compute Stack (ECS) offers from our Edge Division -edge-compute-stack-new-editions-and-features-for-optimized-edge-solutions/ which will be more focused on a GitOps and desired-state approach of managing workloads compared to what you may typically do today with Edge/ROBO deployments that is vCenter Server centric. For all other use cases that may span Healthcare, Retail, Manufacturing Media, Energy, etc. we do have VCF for Edge from a commerce standpoint, again best to work with your account team as they can provide you with more specifics on your scenario and actual pricing/discounting
Hi William, great post. Is it safe to assume that the features in the current NSX Data Center SP Base will be part of VCF under "NSX Networking"? We are particularly interested in NSX gateway firewall (stateful).
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