VMware has launched VMware vSphere+ and VMware vSAN+ to help organizations bring the benefits of the cloud to their existing on-premises infrastructure without disrupting their workloads or hosts.
Introduced at VMworld 2021 as a technology preview known as Project Arctic, these new offerings will help customers improve their infrastructure through centralized cloud-based infrastructure management, integrated Kubernetes, access to new hybrid cloud services, and a flexible subscription model.
Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager for VMware Cloud Platform Business, Cloud Infrastructure Business Group, VMware, said: “VMware vSphere+ and VMware vSAN+ represent the next great evolution of those foundational solutions that customers know and trust.
“Wherever customers are on their digital transformation journey and in executing their cloud strategy, vSphere+ and vSAN+ will help accelerate their transformation by bringing the benefits of the cloud to their existing on-premises infrastructure and workloads, along with simplified use through a flexible subscription model. †
VMware vSphere+ and VMware vSAN+ are an integral part of the VMware Cloud strategy to deliver a consistent infrastructure with value-added capabilities in distributed environments. vSphere+ and vSAN+ enable customers to activate add-on hybrid cloud services that deliver key use cases for mission-critical applications running on-premises, including disaster recovery and ransomware protection. Customers of all sizes will be able to adopt new capabilities, security and product updates at a much faster pace and greatly simplify their operations, without making changes to their existing applications or hardware.
“Transforming on-premises infrastructure with cloud services is an emerging modernization trend that is seeing IDC attract great interest from enterprises,” said Gary Chen, IDC Research Director, Software Defined Compute. “By enabling the ubiquitous data center hypervisor with cloud services, users can build in innovative capabilities that can be delivered immediately and completely from the cloud to address a wide variety of pain points such as management efficiency, Kubernetes business scaling, and DR. † The future possibilities of this delivery model, such as with vSphere+ and vSAN+, are endless and can be an important tool for enterprises to modernize existing infrastructure quickly and with minimal load.”
Under pressure to improve efficiency and productivity, infrastructure teams are looking for more efficient ways to maintain and protect infrastructure to support increasingly larger and more complex environments. In many cases, customers’ vSphere environments are scattered across silo sites, edge sites, and clouds, leading to operational complexity and inefficient maintenance experience.
vSphere+ and vSAN+ provide a unified infrastructure management experience for these distributed environments through the VMware Cloud Console. The console provides global inventory, configuration, alerts, management, and security health for on-premises deployments. Administrators can perform certain operational tasks directly from the VMware Cloud Console, such as managing configurations and policies for their deployments. In addition, customers will benefit from a greatly simplified lifecycle management experience through cloud-enabled automation of updates to on-premises infrastructure components. Customers will also benefit from cloud-based recovery and configuration drift capabilities, including security controls to stay compliant with business and regulatory requirements.
Developer teams are focused on modernizing their applications and infrastructure to deliver better software to production faster. By providing a single workload platform for running VMs and containers orchestrated by Kubernetes, vSphere+ will help transform the on-premises infrastructure into an enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform. This includes providing a multi-cloud IaaS consumption experience for developers by extending the capabilities of VMware Tanzu Standard Runtime, so developers can run and manage Kubernetes at scale with consistency and efficiency across on-premises, public clouds, and edge . The inclusion of VMware Tanzu Mission Control Essentials will give customers worldwide visibility into their entire Kubernetes footprint and automate operational tasks.
Modern organizations need integrated and comprehensive cloud services to consistently strengthen their security posture, quickly recover from disasters and site outages, and better protect against ransomware. With vSphere+ and vSAN+, customers can continue to leverage their existing investments, including toolsets and domain expertise, while taking advantage of the comprehensive capabilities of VMware Cloud. Customers will benefit from protection workflows available as add-on cloud services integrated directly into their operating environment, including VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, an on-demand ransomware and disaster recovery service. New add-on cloud services are under development and are expected to be delivered in the future, giving customers a streamlined path to the cloud should they choose to migrate later.
