Is VMware Smart Assurance NCM End of Life? What Actually Happened

Search for VMware Smart Assurance and the first result is still a VMware blog post announcing the end of support. Search a little further and you find Broadcom saying the configuration management product is not being phased out at all. Both are real, both are from the vendor, and they were published fifteen months apart.

If you operate Smart Assurance Network Configuration Manager, that contradiction is the whole problem. This post lays out what each source actually says, with dates, so you can plan against the facts rather than the search results.

What VMware announced in July 2024

The announcement, published on the VMware Telco Cloud blog on 30 July 2024, covers VMware Smart Assurance as a suite of three modules: the M&R reporting module, the Smarts monitoring module, and Network Configuration Manager.

The headline items were:

• Smart Assurance is no longer available for new purchases, effective 2 February 2024.

• M&R reporting: capabilities to be available through VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance. Extended support scheduled to December 2025, subject to change.

• Smarts monitoring: capabilities to be available through the Domain Manager component of VMware Telco Cloud Service Assurance.

• Network Configuration Manager: described at the time as discontinued, with extended support scheduled to December 2028, subject to Broadcom management approval.

That is the document most people find, and it is why a lot of network teams spent 2024 and 2025 assuming the configuration management half was finished.

What Broadcom published in October 2025

On 29 October 2025, Broadcom Software Academy published a post titled "The Future of Network Configuration Management is Unified, Not Uncertain". It addresses the speculation directly and says Broadcom is bringing Voyence NCM into the Network Observability by Broadcom platform as part of the Fall 2025 release. It states plainly that Broadcom is not phasing out the technology.

Voyence is the original name of the product, from before the EMC acquisition. Anyone who has administered it will recognise it: the software still installs under VOYENCE_HOME to this day.

Broadcom now runs a product page for NCM as a capability within Network Observability, and Broadcom TechDocs carries release documentation beyond the 10.x line that shipped under the Smart Assurance name.

So which is it?

Both, and the distinction matters.

VMware Smart Assurance, as a product you could buy, is gone. That has been true since February 2024 and nothing since has changed it.

The configuration management technology inside it continues, under its original Voyence name, as a capability inside a different platform with different packaging and a different commercial model.

What that means for an existing operator is not "your product is dying". It is closer to "your product has been moved into a suite you did not buy, and the terms of continuing with it are now a conversation with Broadcom". Those are very different problems, and only your account team can tell you what the second one costs.

What we would actually do about it

Four things, in order, and none of them require a decision about a replacement yet.

1. Get the licensing position in writing

Ask Broadcom directly what your entitlement is, what the support end date is now, and what moving the configuration management capability into Network Observability means for your contract. The December 2028 date in the original announcement was published as scheduled and subject to Broadcom management approval. Dates with that qualifier attached are not dates you should build a three year plan around without confirming them.

2. Establish what you would lose

Inventory what you actually use: device coverage, the compliance policies you have built, custom scripts, the integrations feeding other systems. Most teams discover the irreplaceable part is not the product, it is a decade of accumulated compliance rules.

3. Get your configuration data somewhere you control

Whatever you decide, configuration history sitting only inside a vendor platform is a risk. Export it. This is worth doing regardless of the outcome.

4. Then evaluate, with a clear question

The question is not "what replaces Smart Assurance". It is whether you want configuration management as a capability inside an observability suite, or as a product in its own right.

That is a genuine architectural choice, not a marketing one. Bundling configuration management with performance monitoring has a real benefit, which is correlating a config change against a performance problem automatically. It also means your configuration management roadmap, pricing and lifecycle are set by the priorities of a monitoring platform. Smart Assurance NCM operators have now lived through what that looks like once.

Where rConfig fits

rConfig is network configuration management as its own product. It is self-hosted, multi-vendor, runs on Linux, and does not require you to adopt a monitoring platform to get configuration backup, change tracking and compliance.

rConfig Core is free and open source, so an evaluation costs nothing and does not need a procurement conversation. rConfig Pro is priced by device band and the pricing is published.

We are not affiliated with Broadcom or VMware, and the product names above are used for comparison and compatibility context only. If you want to see how rConfig handles the device set you currently manage, read the detail on how rConfig compares to Smart Assurance NCM.

Sources

• VMware Telco Cloud blog, "Announcing the End of Support for VMware Smart Assurance: Everything you need to know", 30 July 2024.

• Broadcom Software Academy, "The Future of Network Configuration Management is Unified, Not Uncertain", 29 October 2025.

• Network Observability by Broadcom, Network Configuration Management solution page, accessed 15 September 2026.

• Broadcom TechDocs, Network Configuration Manager release documentation, accessed 15 September 2026.

VMware and Broadcom details are taken from the vendors' published announcements and documentation on those dates and may change.