Broadcom-VMware Acquisition:  Aria in trouble with cloud management? 

The acquisition of VMware by Broadcom has left many customers with concerns about the future of their virtualization estates.  One area of focus is the VMware Aria Automation suite (formerly known as vRealize Automation – vRA).  As businesses evaluate hypervisor alternatives and risk mitigation it’s crucial to consider Aria’s limitations as well as recent developments such as the elimination of SaaS versions for Aria, as reported in The Register.

In this post, we’ll delve into challenges posed by the Broadcom acquisition with specific focus on hybrid cloud management and automation.  We will also explore why Morpheus Data has emerged as a strategic alternative for many customers getting off of vRA-Aria.

Perceived challenges with VMware Aria Automation Suite

• Expertise Requirements: vRA-Aria was never known for ease of integration and in fact it’s been one of the consistent complaints from users.  Integrating Aria into data centers can take a lot of professional services expertise ($$$) and unlike the VMware of old, Broadcom is not going to give services away for free.  Customers might also face difficulties as the VMware partner ecosystem re-evaluates their options.

• Future Roadmap: The VMware Aria Automation suite has been around a while and despite multiple branding exercises has not added a great deal of new functionality outside of the move to SaaS, which Broadcom recently reversed direction on. As Broadcom squeezes every ounce of profitability from their new asset, many worry that Aria will fall victim to a least common denominator set of features.

• Lock-in Concerns: With the acquisition, there’s a clearly heightened sense of anxiety if not downright terror as horror stories emerge from customers seeing major price increases in some sectors. Customers worry about being tied to a single vendor, limiting their flexibility, and making it challenging to adapt to evolving technology landscapes. Don’t plan on being able to use vRA-Aria as an orchestration tool for alternative hypervisors.

Orchestration considerations as part of an alternative strategy

As businesses evaluate their options amidst the changes in the virtualization and hypervisor market it’s important to recognize the related impact in higher level orchestration or ‘control planes.’  It’s crucial to compare vendor-specific tools like VMware Aria Automation, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM – aka Nutanix Calm), and Azure Arc with more open and agnostic alternatives.

• Vendor Neutrality: Aria, NCM, and Arc are all going to have features biased to their respective hypervisors, limiting organizations to a particular ecosystem. At a minimum, these vendors are likely to prioritize integrating their stack first with degradation of support for other vendors. Morpheus Data’s agnostic platform stands out in offering unparalleled choice because we don’t have a dog in the hypervisor or cloud fight.

• Integration Ecosystem: While Aria, NCM, and Arc may do fine within their respective ecosystems, concerns arise when organizations need to integrate with technologies outside these boundaries.  In the case of cloud management, there are dozens of integration points including networking, config. management, ITSM, backup, etc.  Morpheus Data’s out-of-the-box integrations and open plugin extensibility provide a solution.

• Cross-cloud Control: This may be the most important item to consider as nobody is going to walk away from VMware vSphere overnight, if ever.  You will likely look at decreasing dependence on aspects of VMware and explore other hypervisors such as Nutanix, AzureStack, or KVM along with the acceleration of any public cloud migration.

It’s critical to look for an option that integrates with VMware as well if not better than Aria AND lets you migrate or move to VMware alternatives at your own pace.  Again, Morpheus Data shines here having won Best of VMworld on two separate occasions for hybrid cloud orchestration but also supporting Nutanix, Microsoft, OpenStack, KVM and other VMware alternative hypervisor stacks.

Mitigating Risks with Morpheus Data:

We’re not going to lead you on; of course we think Morpheus is the right choice to replace vRA-Aria and power your hybrid cloud automation.  It has best-in-class award winning integration with VMware but also has that same level of awesomeness with Nutanix, AzureStack, OpenStack, KVM, as well as public clouds including AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Oracle, and more so you can take back control of your application workloads.

Let us help you address some of those Aria Automation challenges and buy you additional time as you reassess your underlying hypervisor strategy. We’ve helped dozens of enterprise customers move off of vRA over the last year and would love the opportunity to share some perspective, insight, and expertise as you consider your options.

We’re even offering a risk-free guided approach in this time of need.  We can jump on a call to talk about your situation and if it seems like Morpheus could be a fit, we can kick-start things with a consultative pilot to prove value without any software license commitment.  If you’re an existing vRA or Aria customer we can help migrate blueprints and show you how simple Morpheus is compared to vRA.  If you’re new to private cloud automation, we’ll show you the power of enabling developer self-service in a futureproof way to turn your on-premises estate into a true private cloud.

Interested? Request a demo and let’s talk about your VMware risk mitigation strategy.