Last week, we published VMware End of Availability on Many VMware vSphere Editions. That article referenced VMware KB96168, which was taken down, and VMware provided a new linked blog with guidance. The story is largely the same, but now there is some guidance on which subscription service a customer can transition to.
VMware Updates its EOA Plan
Broadcom’s VMware is still ending product sales of a huge list of products. It now has a table with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) replacements. Since VMware now has a habit of deleting its EOA documentation, we are going to copy the table from the source VMware blog here for our readers to reference:
| Products no longer available as standalone (all editions and pricing metrics) | Replacement Product Included in VCF/VVF/Add-on? (Y/N) |
Which Product or Add-On? |
| VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus | Y | VCF, VVF |
| VMware vSphere+ | N | |
| VMware vSphere Enterprise | N | |
| VMware vSphere Standard (excluding subscription) | Y | Replaced with new vSphere Standard |
| VMware vSphere ROBO | N | |
| VMware vSphere Scale Out | N | |
| VMware vSphere Desktop | N | |
| VMware vSphere Acceleration Kits | N | |
| VMware vSphere Essentials Kit | N | |
| VMware vSphere Essentials Plus (excluding new subscription offering) | Y | Replaced with vSphere Essentials Plus Kit |
| VMware vSphere Starter/Foundation | N | |
| VMware vSphere with Operations Management | N | |
| VMware vSphere Basic | N | |
| VMware vSphere Advanced | N | |
| VMware vSphere Storage Appliance | N | |
| VMware vSphere Hypervisor (free edition) | N | |
| VMware Cloud Foundation (excluding new VCF subscription offering) | N | |
| VMware Cloud Foundation for VDI | N | |
| VMware Cloud Foundation for ROBO | N | |
| VMware SDDC Manager | Y | VCF |
| VMware vCenter Standard | Y | VCF, VVF and vSphere STD |
| VMware vCenter Foundation | N | |
| VMware vSAN | Y | VCF, VVF, vSAN add-on |
| VMware vSAN ROBO | N | |
| VMware vSAN Desktop | N | |
| VMware vSAN+ | N | |
| VMware HCI Kit | N | |
| VMware Site Recovery Manager | Y | Add-On Service |
| VMware Cloud Editions/Cloud Packs | N | Replaced with VCF, VVF |
| VMware vCloud Suite | N | Replaced with VCF, VVF |
| VMware Aria Suite (formerly vRealize Suite) | Y | VCF, VVF |
| VMware Aria Universal Suite (formerly vRealize Cloud Universal) | N | |
| VMware Aria Suite Term | Y | VCF, VVF |
| VMware Aria Operations for Networks (formerly vRealize Network Insight) | Y | VCF |
| VMWare Aria Operations for Networks Universal (formerly vRealize Network Insight Universal) | N | |
| VMware vRealize Network Insight ROBO | N | |
| VMWare Aria Operations for Logs (formerly vRealize Log Insight) | Y | VVF, VCF |
| VMware vRealize Operations 8 Application Monitoring Add-On | N | |
| VMware Aria Operations | Y | VVF, VCF |
| VMware Aria Automation | Y | VCF |
| VMware Aria Suite Cloud for US Public Sector | N | |
| VMware Aria Automation for Secure Hosts add-on (formerly SaltStack SecOps) | Y | Tanzu GuardRails Add-On |
| VMware vRealize Automation SaltStack SecOps add-on | Y | Tanzu GuardRails Add-On |
| VMware Aria Operations for Integrations (formerly vRealize True Visibility Suite) | Y | VCF, VVF |
| VMware Cloud Director | Y | VCF (CSP only) |
| VMware Cloud Director Service | N | |
| VMware NSX | Y | VCF and VMware Firewall (with ATP) |
| VMware NSX for Desktop | N | |
| VMware NSX ROBO | N | |
| VMware NSX Distributed Firewall | Y | VCF and VMware Firewall |
| VMware NSX Gateway Firewall | Y | VCF and VMware Firewall |
| VMware NSX Threat Prevention to Distributed Firewall | Y | VCF and VMware Firewall (with ATP) |
| VMware NSX Threat Prevention to Gateway Firewall | Y | VCF and VMware Firewall (with ATP) |
| VMware NSX Advanced Threat Prevention to Distributed Firewall | Y | VCF and VMware Firewall (with ATP) |
| VMware NSX Advanced Threat Prevention to Gateway Firewall | Y | VCF and VMware Firewall (with ATP) |
| VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (excluding Subscription, SaaS) | Y | VMware Load Balancer (AVI) Add-On |
| VMware Container Networking Enterprise with Antrea | Y | VCF and VMware Firewall |
| VMware HCX | Y | VCF |
| VMware HCX+ | N |
(Source: VMware)
By our count, that is 59 total entries. Of which, only 27 have a “Y” in that middle column for there being a replacement product included in VCF or VVF potentially with an add-on.
At this point, you may be trying to reference back to the original KB96168 article and see if there are differences. There are since this is 59 items, we have three net new lines added to this list:
- VMware vSphere Enterprise
- VMware vSAN+
- VMware Aria Suite Cloud for US Public Sector
Those are the five on this new list, but not on last week’s list. All three are listed as not VCF/ VVF/ add-on path items.
Final Words
Again, this is just part of Broadcom’s strategy to focus on larger customers and earn more for the same products and services than VMware standalone did. This is a playbook used by the company so many times that we went down to the chip level to show our readers how it works when the announcement piece was written. Almost two years later, we would expect most smaller customers have already left VMware on their own terms and so are not impacted by this. Still, there are going to be those who have not done migration projects yet, and these EOA announcements will be challenging for them. Many let us know this is the case in the comments last time.
I’m not sure where you get the impression that most small customers have moved away from it. For a variety of reasons we have many clients still on ESXi, including Horizon View footprints. Proxmox and Citrix are not viable options for a lot of smaller customers that are struggling just to manage VMWare solutions. Everyone is now scrambling to figure out alternatives.
Have to agree with Scott here. SMB are by no means away from esxi – actually it’s quite the opposite thing – at least in most parts of europe. Certain german-speaking countris may have a quite strong proxmox following, but scandinavia is almost entirely vmware country with only a very few hyper-v and even fewer Xenserver.
Hi,
Please don’t call this VMware…this is broadcom. Legacy VMware didn’t treat customers like this.
@Brenda: VMware has been on a downward slope for a few years before this buyout. They started price hikes long before it as well. They even discontinued free licensing to educational institutions via the VMware Academic Resources program. This was a critical error that sacrificed long-term viability for short-term gains. I know of few institutions that had to remove VMware from their curriculum because the new cost of this program was simply too expensive.
Software used at educational institutions influences the workforce. Familiarity with the tools makes them more likely to employ them in their future projects.
Microsoft understands that and has been giving out their software basically for free. In fact they used to charge for their educational offering, but changed recently to making it free of charge (Azure Dev Tools for Teaching).