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 IT productivity and operational efficiency.
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 services could be consumed when they are needed and easily increased when demand spikes?
Introducing vSphere+ Standard edition
With this (and more) in mind, we introduced VMware vSphere+ earlier this year. And we have been absolutely thrilled with the positive customer response and fast adoption of vSphere+ over the past few months! As we received feedback from customers, one key need became clear. Customers choose different editions from the vSphere product family for different environments and workload types, and are looking to connect their entire footprint to the VMware Cloud Console and get the benefits of cloud services and centralized management. And while it has been a very easy transition for customers to go from vSphere Enterprise Plus to vSphere+, the environments running on vSphere Standard edition may be okay using only the basic features of vSphere but still need the benefits of cloud connectivity.
To address this customer need and use case, I am excited to share that VMware vSphere+ Standard, a new cloud-connected edition in the vSphere product family, is now Generally Available as of today. Similar to vSphere+, the vSphere+ Standard edition is also available as a subscription with a per core metric, and does not require license management via keys.
What’s Included
vSphere+ Standard subscription includes vSphere Standard as well as vCenter Standard, and customers can deploy as many instances of vCenter as they need.
Let’s explore some key benefits of vSphere+ Standard:
Boost productivity with admin services: Leverage the Cloud Console and centrally manage and monitor global inventory, cluster capacity, alert status, security posture, and provision VMs to any vSphere cluster. Simplify the lifecycle management of vCenter instances with single-click. Reduce maintenance windows of updates, allowing for more rapid deployments of new features. Get automatic detection and remediation of configurations across the vSphere estate.
Transform on-premises infrastructure with cloud integration: Realize benefits of the cloud while enhancing existing on-premises vSphere deployments in place with vSphere+ Standard, without any disruption or modifications to hosts and workloads. Activate add-on cloud services that expedite disaster recovery, provide ransomware protection, and simplify capacity optimization and planning, with more in development. Gain the flexibility of OpEx-based consumption while improving ROI from existing investments. vSphere+ Standard enables unified visibility and management across on-premises environments.
Subscription Upgrade Program Enables Smooth Transition
VMware introduced a Subscription Upgrade Program (SUP) in July 2022 to help customers easily transition from existing perpetual licenses to subscriptions. When moving from perpetual licenses to subscriptions, a customer’s subscription metric transitions from per-CPU to per-core. With the initial upgrade, a customer will trade in their per-CPU perpetual license for entitlement of up to 32 cores, based on their server configuration, but pay for only 16 cores. At renewal time, the customer would then pay for the total number of cores to be entitled.
With the introduction of vSphere+ Standard, VMware is extending SUP to this new edition, so customers can easily transition from vSphere Standard licenses to vSphere+ Standard subscription.
Next Steps
Ready to get started on your journey with vSphere+ Standard? Check out these helpful resources:
