VMware is to offer vSphere and vSAN as on-premises subscription services.
Project Arctic was announced in 2021 as an initiative to offer vSphere as a service, integrated with public clouds, with disaster recovery and security improvements added in. The new SaaS offerings are called vSphere+ and vSAN+ and bring a public cloud operating model to the virtulization technology.
Krish Prasad, GM for the VMware Cloud Platform Business, said: “VMware vSphere+ and VMware vSAN+ represent the next major evolution of those foundational solutions that customers know and trust.”
He said vSphere+ and vSAN+ will bring “the benefits of cloud to [customer’s] existing on-premises infrastructure and workloads, along with simplified consumption via a flexible subscription model.”
The two will enable customers to activate add-on hybrid cloud services for applications running on-premises, including scale-out Kubernetes operations, disaster recovery, and ransomware protection. Customers can use the two new offerings without making changes to their existing applications or hardware.
VMware admits that, in many instances, customers’ vSphere environments are distributed across siloed locations, edge sites, and clouds leading to operational complexity and inefficient maintenance experiences. A VMware Cloud Console provides a unified infrastructure management for vSphere+ and vSAN+ with a global inventory, configuration, alerts, administration, and security status for on-premises deployments. Admin staff will be able to perform some operational tasks directly from the this Cloud Console such as managing configurations and policies across their deployments.
VMware will provide cloud-enabled automation of updates of on-premises infrastructure components. There will be cloud-based remediation and configuration drift capabilities, including security checks, to maintain compliance with corporate and regulatory requirements.
The vSphere+ offering will provide a single workload platform for running VMs and containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. It will extend the capabilities of VMware Tanzu Standard Runtime to enable developers to run and manage Kubernetes at scale across on-premises, to give customers global visibility across their entire Kubernetes footprint and automate operational tasks.
The integrated VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery is an on-demand ransomware and disaster recovery service. There are more add-on cloud services under development.
vSAN+ connects all vCenter instances (at the customer’s discretion) to VMware Cloud for centralized management. A vCenter cloud gateway virtual appliance is installed on-premises and connects with vCenter to collect the minimal data needed for display within the VMware Cloud Console. Through this console, customers will see their entire HCI estate and can centrally monitor events, alerts, resource capacity, and identify unaddressed security deficiencies.
The on-premises subscription consumption model has a single SKU that includes all necessary components (including VMware vCenter, VMware ESXi, Tanzu Standard Runtime, and Tanzu Mission Control Essentials) and support.
Read a vSphere+ blog and a vSAN+ blog for more information.
vSphere+ and vSAN+ are expected to be available by July 29, 2022. Tanzu Mission Control Essentials is a component of vSphere+ and is expected to be available by the end of October.
