What is the difference between VMware vRealize Suite and vCloud Suite

Several times I have been asked by my customers what is the difference between VMware vRealize Suite and vCloud Suite. Both are actually licensing packaging suits. VMware vCloud Suite suite is the superset of VMware vRealize Suite. In other words, vCloud Suite includes everything as vRealize Suite plus vSphere Infrastructure (ESXi Enterprise Plus licenses).

VMware vRealize Suite is a purpose-built management solution for the heterogeneous data center and the hybrid cloud. It is designed to deliver and manage infrastructure and applications to increase business agility while maintaining IT control. It provides the most comprehensive management stack for private and public clouds, multiple hypervisors, and physical infrastructure.

vRealize Suite editions comparison is available here and visualized on figure below.

vRealize Suite editions comparison

More specifically vRealize Suite 2017 includes following components:

• vSphere Replication 6.5.1
• vSphere Data Protection 6.1.5
• vSphere Big Data Extensions 2.3.2
• vRealize Orchestrator Appliance 7.3.0
• vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 1.0
• vRealize Operations Manager 6.6.1
• vRealize Business for Cloud 7.3.1
• vRealize Log Insight 4.5.0
• vRealize Automation 7.3.0
• vRealize Code Stream Management Pack for IT DevOps 2.2.1

VMware vCloud Suite brings together VMware’s industry-leading vSphere hypervisor with vRealize Suite, the complete cloud management solution.

vCloud Suite 2017 currently includes vRealize Suite 2017 and vSphere Enterprise Plus and NSX-V:

• Everything included in vRealize Suite 2017
• plus vSphere Enterprise Plus Infrastructure for vCloud Suite (ESXi licenses only, vCenter is not included)
• ESXi 6.5 U1
• plus NSX-V
• NSX-V 6.3.3

What's new in 2017 Suites?

1. VMware has introduced new overall manager called vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager to simplify deployment and on-going management of the vRealize products.
2. NSX-V (NSX for vSphere) is included in vCloud Suite 2017 ???

Please note, that vCenter Server is not included in vCloud Suite, therefore additional license for vCloud Suite is required.

Hope this helps to understand VMware license packaging.

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UPDATE 2017-09-20:  The note about NSX-V licensing in vCloud Suite 2017 Release announcement is a little bit misleading. On VMware WebSite here is written

NSX is available as an optional component that can be purchased with vCloud Suite. 

So, VMware vCloud Suite 2017 customers are not entitled to use full NSX-V. It is just an entitlement to use NSX Manager for AV (replacement for vCNS Endpoint). NSX Manager for AV has been available for free even before vCloud Suite 2017 so that's nothing new. And of course, any VMware customer can purchase full NSX-V to extend their vSphere infrastructure for a network virtualization and datacenter modernization.