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New VMware offerings improve cloud infrastructure management
Fri, 1st Jul 2022
FYI, this story is more than a year old

VMware has unveiled VMware vSphere+ and VMware vSAN+ to help organisations bring the benefits of the cloud to their existing on-premises infrastructure with no disruption to their workloads or hosts.

Introduced at VMworld 2021 as a technology preview known as Project Arctic, these new offerings are designed to help customers enhance infrastructure by providing centralised 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, says, “VMware vSphere+ and VMware vSAN+ represent the next major 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 cloud to their existing on-premises infrastructure and workloads, along with simplified consumption via a flexible subscription model.

VMware vSphere+ and VMware vSAN+ are an important part of the VMware Cloud strategy to deliver consistent infrastructure with value-added capabilities across distributed environments.

vSphere+ and vSAN+ enable customers to activate add-on hybrid cloud services that deliver on key use cases for business-critical applications running on-premises, including disaster recovery and ransomware protection.

Customers of all sizes will be able to consume new capabilities, security and product updates at a faster pace and simplify their operations without making changes to their existing applications or hardware, the company states.

Gary Chen, IDC research director, software defined compute, says, “The transformation of on-premises infrastructure with cloud services is an emerging modernisation trend that IDC is seeing draw significant interest from enterprises.

"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 modernise existing infrastructure quickly with minimal burden.

vSphere+ and vSAN+ provide a unified infrastructure management experience for distributed environments via the VMware Cloud Console. The console features global inventory, configuration, alerts, administration and security status for on-premises deployments.

Admins will be able to perform certain operational tasks directly from the VMware Cloud Console such as managing configurations and policies across their deployments. Additionally, customers will benefit from a vastly simplified lifecycle management experience through cloud-enabled automation of updates of on-premises infrastructure components.

Customers will also gain from cloud-based remediation and configuration drift capabilities, including security checks to maintain compliance with corporate and regulatory requirements, VMware states.

Developer teams are focused on modernising their applications and infrastructure to deliver better software to production, faster. Providing a single workload platform for running VMs and containers orchestrated by Kubernetes, vSphere+ will help transform on-premises infrastructure into an enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform, according to the company.

This includes providing a multi-cloud IaaS consumption experience for developers by extending the capabilities of VMware Tanzu Standard Runtime to enable developers to 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 provide customers with global visibility across their entire Kubernetes footprint and automate operational tasks.

Modern organisations require integrated and expanded cloud services to consistently bolster their security posture, recover from disasters and site outages, and better protect against ransomware.

With vSphere+ and vSAN+, customers will continue to use their existing investments, including toolsets and domain expertise, while benefiting from the expanded capabilities of VMware Cloud, the company states.

Customers will benefit from protection workflows available as add-on cloud services directly integrated 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 providing customers with a streamlined path to the cloud, should they choose to migrate down the road.

With vSphere+ and vSAN+, organisations will be able to adopt a subscription-based consumption model for their on-premises deployments. Customers can further benefit from a single SKU that includes all necessary components (including VMware vCenter, VMware ESXi, Tanzu Standard Runtime, and Tanzu Mission Control Essentials), and support.