VMware vSphere+: Introducing The Enterprise Workload Platform

On-Premises and Cloud: Workloads In The Multi-Cloud Era

As organizations embrace the multi-cloud era, workloads continue to proliferate everywhere. Each workload has its own set of requirements, which defines it’s optimal deployment location. As a result, most enterprises have workloads running in multiple clouds as well as on-premises, either as traditional infrastructure, as private clouds, or hosted by third parties. As we look to the future, one thing we know for sure is that there will be more workloads everywhere, including on-premises.

Workloads running on-premises enjoy a variety of benefits, including locality, low latency, performance, predictable cost, and much more. However, they can miss out on the innovations available in the cloud.

Furthermore, in the case of a distributed environment, workloads may be spread across infrastructure siloes and multiple operating models, making management difficult. The underlying infrastructure resources may not come with the toolset needed to enable developer velocity and modern applications.

Bringing the Benefits of Cloud to On-premises Workloads

What if the benefits of public clouds could be harnessed by on-premises workloads, without having to migrate them to the cloud? What if new capabilities could be accessed through SaaS, relieving maintenance burdens while fast-tracking new enhancements? What if developers could provision infrastructure just as easily on-premises as they do in the public cloud? What if services could be consumed when they are needed and easily increased when demand spikes? What if all this was possible today?

Introducing VMware vSphere+

VMware vSphere+, the multi-cloud workload platform, delivers benefits of the cloud to on-premises workloads. vSphere+ combines industry-leading virtualization technology, an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment, and high-value cloud services to transform existing on-premises deployments into SaaS-enabled infrastructure that can help organizations centralize management, supercharge productivity, and accelerate innovation.

Building upon the advanced technology within the latest version of vSphere Enterprise Plus edition, vSphere+ provides access to a wide selection of cloud services and centralizes management through the VMware Cloud Console. Workloads remain on-premises, running on ESXi hosts orchestrated by vCenter instances, just like traditional vSphere today. But now vCenter can connect to the Cloud Console through a VMware cloud gateway, allowing metadata to be collected and used to centrally manage the entire distributed vSphere+ estate. Admin services can then be used to simplify global operations, developer services can be used to manage the Kubernetes environment, and optional add-on hybrid cloud services can be purchased to extend the capabilities of vSphere+ even further.

Using vSphere+ together with vSAN+, IT admins and application developers will more easily be able to build, run, manage, protect, and secure their traditional and next-gen workloads. vSphere+ is available through a flexible subscription plan which will appeal to a growing majority of organizations that now prefer this way of consuming software. Everything you need – all components of vSphere+, including ESXi hosts, vCenter instances, cloud gateways, Cloud Console for admin services, Tanzu Standard Runtime and Tanzu Mission Control Essentials (in development) for developer/devops services, and service/support, are included in one subscription.

vSphere+ deliver benefits in three key areas:

Supercharge productivity with Admin services
Accelerate innovation with Developer services
Transform on-premises infrastructure with Cloud integration

Let’s take a better look at each.

Workloads, applications, and data tend to grow exponentially, but staffing and budgets do not. The only way to keep up is by scaling the efficiency and productivity of your teams so they can achieve more with the limited resources they have. vSphere+ connects to the Cloud Console providing a set of admin services to drive significant operational efficiencies and productivity gains.

Cloud Console

The Cloud Console builds upon the foundation laid by VMware’s other cloud offerings, and acts as a single management plane to centralize many tasks that would normally need to be performed separately from multiple vCenter instances.

Admin Services

Through the cloud console, several admin services can be utilized to simplify and streamline management of the entire vSphere+ estate. These services are delivered through the cloud, so they are easy to use without having to download or install anything.

vCenter lifecycle management service – This service makes on-premises vCenter updates a lot simpler and faster. When an update is available you simply click the ‘Update Now’ button and the service takes care of the rest. The maintenance window is only a few minutes, and if there’s a problem you can roll back to the previous version.
Global inventory service – With this service you can visualize available resources across the entire vSphere+ estate. See all your clusters, hosts, VMs at a glance, and quickly assess the CPU, memory, storage and other resources you have at your command.
Event view service – View all events and alerts across your entire vSphere+ estate. This makes it easy to quickly triage problems that need immediate attention without having to manually check individual vCenters separately.
Security health check service – Monitor your security posture across the entire vSphere+ estate. Highlight security exposures across all vSphere+ infrastructure, such as idle SSH sessions or deprecated SSL protocols and initiate remedial actions.
Provision VM service – Quickly create VMs from the cloud console without having to first connect to a vCenter instance. If you need to create a lot of VMs in different places, this can be a real time saver.
Configuration management service – Sometimes vCenter configurations can diverge from each other. With this service, you’ll be able to quickly spot configuration drift so you can keep your vCenter configurations in line with your global standard.

Since admin services are delivered as SaaS through the Cloud Console, enhancements will appear without requiring any manual downloads or updates. New services will also be introduced when they are ready.

Every enterprise is a software company now. The digital transformation has placed applications at the center of every goal, mission, project, and campaign. How well an organization executes will increasingly depend on those applications and how quickly they can be developed and deployed. vSphere+ goes beyond virtual machines and brings containers to the fingertips of your developers, enabling them to bypass ticketing systems and get the infrastructure resources they need to build applications, through a Kubernetes API surface. If you are familiar with vSphere with Tanzu, then you know how we integrated Kubernetes directly into vSphere back in 2020. With vSphere+, we have taken this integration several steps further.

Developer Services

With vSphere+, users can transform their existing vSphere-based infrastructure into an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment, unifying VMs and containers on a single platform.

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service – Run your containerized applications on a certified Kubernetes distribution, integrated with vSphere, using your existing tooling and workflows to give developers on-demand access to conformant Kubernetes clusters on-premises.
VM service – Create VMs using Kubernetes commands and APIs, useful when building apps that include a combination of VMs and containers.
Network service – Allows developers to manage virtual routers, load balancers, and firewall rules. Configure, monitor, and administer switching access for VMs and Kubernetes workloads.
Storage service – Allows developers to manage persistent disks for use with containers, Kubernetes, and virtual machines. Deploy existing block and file storage infrastructure for containerized workloads.
Tanzu integrated services – Streamlines the deployment and management of local and in-cluster platform services, such as logging, registry, monitoring, and ingress, to easily configure and maintain a production-ready Kubernetes environment.
Tanzu Mission Control Essentials – This will enable developers and DevOps teams to centralize platform operations and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with observability, troubleshooting, and resiliency. This service is in development and expected to be available in Q3.

We have made vSphere+ easy and non-disruptive to adopt and use. For new customers or new deployments, it’s easy to subscribe and get started. For customers with existing vSphere deployments, you can upgrade in place and then convert your existing perpetual licenses to subscription. After you’ve made the switch, you can extend the capabilities of vSphere+ even further with optional add-on hybrid cloud services that you can subscribe to when you’re ready.

Upgrade in Place

For existing vSphere customers, transitioning to vSphere+ is quick and easy. All of your existing vCenter instances and ESXi hosts remain on-premises. Nothing is migrated or moved. At the user’s discretion, their selected vCenter instances are connected to VMware Cloud via one or more cloud gateways, also installed on-premises. While your vCenter instances will probably need to be updated to the latest release, your ESXi hosts will likely not need to be touched since the currently supported ESXi versions continue to be supported in vSphere+. Once you are connected to the cloud, you’re ready to convert your licenses to subscription.

Convert to Subscription

If you have any vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses that you would like to convert to vSphere+, we are ready to help. We have an upgrade program to help you preserve the value of your existing vSphere investment. With the help of VMware customer service or a certified VMware Partner, your perpetual licenses will be converted to subscription, and you’ll never have to deal with license keys ever again. After that, it’s easy to monitor your subscriptions and usage from the Cloud Console.

Activate Add-on Services

vSphere+ has an immense feature set with tremendous potential. But when you consider the entire VMware SaaS portfolio of cloud services, the possibilities would seem unlimited. Disaster recovery, ransomware protection, cloud burst capacity, and capacity planning are just a few of the key use cases we are developing right now, based on customer feedback. Workflow integration will ensure that these extended capabilities will be actionable within the Cloud Console.

The first of these optional add-on services that will be available very soon will be VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. With this add-on service, you will be able to reliably protect and recover mission-critical applications. Customers will benefit from integrated protection workflows directly within the vSphere+ cloud console that will streamline IT operations and reduce risk of downtime in the event of regional outages or ransomware attacks.