VMware brings cloud benefits to existing enterprise infrastructure

VMware, Inc. has released VMware vSphere+ and VMware vSAN+ to assist organizations in bringing the benefits of the cloud to their existing on-premises infrastructure while minimizing disruption to workloads and hosts.

These new offerings, introduced at VMworld 2021 as a Project Arctic technology preview, will help customers improve their infrastructure by providing centralized cloud-based infrastructure management, integrated Kubernetes, access to new hybrid cloud services, and a flexible subscription model.

“VMware vSphere+ and VMware vSAN+ represent the next major evolution of those foundational solutions that customers know and trust,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager for VMware Cloud Platform Business, Cloud Infrastructure Business Group, VMware. “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 cloud to their existing on-premises infrastructure and workloads, along with simplified consumption via a flexible subscription model.”

VMware vSphere+ and VMware vSAN+ are essential components of the VMware Cloud strategy, which aims to provide consistent infrastructure with value-added capabilities across distributed environments. Customers will be able to activate add-on hybrid cloud services for business-critical applications running on-premises, such as disaster recovery and ransomware protection, using vSphere+ and vSAN+.

“The transformation of on-premises infrastructure with cloud services is an emerging modernization trend that IDC is seeing draw significant interest from enterprises,” said Gary Chen, IDC Research Director, Software Defined Compute. “By enabling the ubiquitous datacenter hypervisor with cloud services, users will be able to onboard innovative capabilities that can be delivered immediately and fully managed from the cloud to address a broad range of pain points such as management efficiency, scale out Kubernetes operations, and DR. The future possibilities of this delivery model, such as with vSphere+ and vSAN+, are endless and can be a key tool for enterprises to modernize existing infrastructure quickly with minimal burden.”

“VMware vSphere+ blurs the line between on-premises and cloud,” said Vishal Gupta, CIO for Lexmark. “The combination of cloud operating model with familiar toolsets will be a big win for us.”

Simplify Operations with Centralized Infrastructure Management

Infrastructure operations teams are looking for more efficient ways to maintain and protect infrastructure in order to support increasingly larger and more complex environments. Customers’ vSphere environments are frequently distributed across siloed locations, edge sites, and clouds, resulting in operational complexity and inefficient maintenance.

vSphere+ and vSAN+ provide a unified infrastructure management experience for these distributed environments via the VMware Cloud Console. For on-premises deployments, the console provides global inventory, configuration, alerts, administration, and security status. Administrators will be able to manage configurations and policies across their deployments directly from the VMware Cloud Console.

Customers will also benefit from a vastly simplified lifecycle management experience thanks to cloud-enabled automation of on-premises infrastructure component updates. Customers will also benefit from cloud-based remediation and configuration drift capabilities, as well as security checks to ensure corporate and regulatory compliance.

Simplified Consumption via a Flexible Subscription Model

Organizations will be able to use a subscription-based consumption model for their on-premises deployments with vSphere+ and vSAN+. Customers will also benefit from a single SKU that includes all required components as well as support (including VMware vCenter, VMware ESXi, Tanzu Standard Runtime, and Tanzu Mission Control Essentials).

vSphere+ and vSAN+ are both new offerings that are expected to be available by the end of VMware’s fiscal year 23 second quarter (July 29, 2022). Tanzu Mission Control Essentials is a component of vSphere+ and will be available in VMware’sfiscal year 23 third quarter.