Aria Suite

What is the Aria Suite?

The VMware Aria Suite is a cloud management platform made up of a bundle of products.  This enables customers to quickly and consistently deploy virtual machines, manage large scale environments and drive operational efficiency.    This suite can be run in nearly any cloud – whether it is a private cloud in your own data center  or a public cloud (such as VMware Cloud on AWS, as well as a number of other offerings).

What happened to the vRealize Suite?
The VMware vRealize Suite is being renamed to VMware Aria Suite.  This was announced at VMware Explore 2022.     In the near future, you will begin seeing new versions of existing products begin to adopt this name change in both On-Premises and SaaS products.  New products are planned for the VMware Aria suite as well. 

The Aria Suite is delivered as a single license key that can be used across all products in the suite.  Generally all products are upgraded at the same time.  There is however a way to mix product versions between the suites.  See VMware KB 67136 for details.

The products can be tightly integrated to allow for the maximum benefit.  For example a vRealize Automation Blueprint can create NSX Networks and firewall rules as necessary as well as integrate with vRealize Operations to ensure that VMs created by a department are automatically included in the charge back process that is used to track usage back to cost centers.

Products included in the Aria Suite

If you are accustomed to the names from the vRealize Suite, check out this chart to see how the product names have changed.

Purchasing the Aria Suite for On-Premises

The vRealize Suite is licensed by PLU or Portable License Unit.  As the name suggests, the license is portable depending on where it is used:

  • In your own data center – 1 PLU = 1 CPU
  • For the public cloud – 1 PLU = 15 workloads.

The Aria Suite comes in 3 Editions (Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise).

Product versions by Aria Suite release

Each version of the Aria / vRealize Suite comes with distinct versions of the products in the bundle

vRealize Suite 2019 (release notes) – Keys for this product should work for any newer versions of a product (ie vRealize Operations 8.5) until the next version of the suite comes out

  • vRealize Automation 8.0
  • vRealize Orchestrator 8.0
  • vRealize Operations Manager 8.0
  • vRealize Log Insight 8.0
  • vRealize Lifecycle Manager 8.0

vRealize Suite 2018 (release notes)

  • vRealize Automation 7.5
  • vRealize Orchestrator 7.5
  • vRealize Business for Cloud 7.5
  • vRealize Operations Manager 7.0
  • vRealize Log Insight 4.7
  • vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 2.0

vRealize Suite 2017 (release notes)

  • vRealize Automation 7.3
  • vRealize Orchestrator 7.3
  • vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3 & 7.3.1
  • vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 & 6.6.1
  • vRealize Log Insight 4.5
  • vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.0