The VCF 9 upgrade guide | Part 2 – Aria vs CMP

Part 2 of 3. Read Part 1: why companies are making the move | Read Part 3: after the Aria upgrade

VCF 9 does not give Aria customers a simple version bump. VMware Aria Operations and Aria Automation become VCF Operations and VCF Automation, and getting there is a replatforming project. The cost of that project is not the license line. It is the integration rework, the validation effort, and the deeper dependency on a single vendor.

That dependency is the part worth weighing carefully. Part 1 of this series noted that Broadcom has cut list pricing on VCF subscriptions, and that is accurate as far as list pricing goes. What organizations report at renewal has moved the other way: 59% of the IT decision-makers in CloudBolt’s CII Reality Report 2026 saw increases above 25%, 85% expect further increases, and 86% are actively reducing their VMware footprint while only 4% have completed a full migration away. List price and renewal reality are two different numbers, and the second one is the one that shapes budgets.

The engineering effort is roughly the same whether a team upgrades further into Broadcom’s stack or moves to a control plane that does not extend the lock-in. That makes this upgrade a decision point, and the question worth asking is where the effort should land before the work is scoped.

The licensing question is the least interesting part of this upgrade