VMware, Inc. unveiled VMware vSphere+ and VMware vSAN+ to help organizations 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 will help customers enhance 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 an integral part of the VMware Cloud strategy to deliver consistent infrastructure with value-added capabilities across distributed environments. vSphere+ and vSAN+ will 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 much faster pace and vastly simplify their operations-without making changes to their existing applications or hardware.

"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

Under pressure to improve efficiency and productivity, infrastructure operations teams are seeking more efficient ways to maintain and protect infrastructure to support increasingly larger and more complex environments. In many instances, customers' vSphere environments are distributed across siloed locations, edge sites, and clouds leading to operational complexity and inefficient maintenance experience.

vSphere+ and vSAN+ provide a unified infrastructure management experience for these 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.

Accelerate Developer Velocity with Integrated Kubernetes

Developer teams are focused on modernizing 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. 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.

Extend On-Premises with Seamless Hybrid Cloud Services

Modern organizations require integrated and expanded cloud services to consistently bolster their security posture, quickly 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. 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.

Simplified Consumption via a Flexible Subscription Model

With vSphere+ and vSAN+, organizations will be able to adopt a subscription-based consumption model for their on-premises deployments. Customers will 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.

vSphere+ and vSAN+ are both new offerings and are expected to be available by the end of VMware's FY23 Q2 (July 29, 2022). Tanzu Mission Control Essentials is a component of vSphere+ and is expected to be available in VMware's FY23 Q3.