June 27, 2022

Announcing vSphere+

VMware’s new vSphere offering is an industry-leading workload platform, that allows current and new on-premises infrastructures to be cloud connected while shifting to an OpEx-based consumption model with pay-as-you-grow subscription. Today, the announcement of vSphere+™, and vSAN+™ provides an extremely powerful tool for our customers’ hybrid-cloud strategy. Having access to a unified cloud portal does not affect your on-premises environments or access to the way you manage your on-prem vCenter instances; instead, it enhances visibility, security posture, and management capabilities.

Let’s dive into the technical aspects of vSphere+ and vSAN+.

Global Monitoring 

After onboarding to vSphere+ and vSAN+, the first thing you will notice is that you can quickly see all of your vCenters in one single location. Think of Enhanced Linked Mode but with an unlimited number of vCenters. Yes, that is correct. You can have tens or hundreds of vCenters in one single portal. That alone is a big plus+ (pun intended), as having that global view and state of all your vCenters in one location will not only save you a lot of time checking on your infrastructure, but also allows you to quickly assess the state of your entire global infrastructure.

 

vSphere+ Inventory View

 

Convert to Subscription

Once vCenters are added to the cloud portal, the current licenses will be viewable from one location and conversion to subscription can be achieved with one easy click. You can select all or a few vCenters to convert to subscription model. You will also have visibility of your subscription allocation, and current usage.

 

Centralized Security and Operations

Being able to have a single location to identify any potential security issues is a great advantage that vSphere+ delivers to your infrastructure. Easily identify top events, or vCenters having the greatest number of events, issues, or alerts; makes troubleshooting and assessment a breeze with little to no intervention. See trends of when events are occurring and dive deep into those environments that are having issues. Launch your on-premises vCenter UI from the Cloud Portal with a seamless integration between cloud and on-premises user interfaces.

 

vSphere+ Operations

 

Desired State Configuration

Ever wanted to have all your vCenters with the same configuration in an easy way? Look no further. With Desired State Configuration, you can create a vCenter profile and assign it to all or some of your vSphere+ registered vCenters. Run compatibility checks and discover any configuration drift with a list of settings that differ from the main vCenter profile. All this with a simple approach, and easy to use centralized cloud portal.

vSphere+ Desired State Configuration

 

Virtual Machine Inventory and Creation

Imagine being able to create virtual machines from one portal to ANY vCenter regardless their physical location. Imagine no more. With vSphere+ and vSAN+, you can leverage the cloud portal to deploy virtual machines to any of the registered vCenters. You can leverage existing templates for specific deployments, and with vSAN+ you can select vSAN Datastores to take advantage of shared storage on your Software-Defined Datacenter. This will trigger a VM creation on those vCenters without having to VPN or login into those on-premises vCenter consoles. Within minutes VMs will be created and will be visible under the global list of virtual machines in the VMware cloud portal.

vSphere+ VM Creation

 

vCenter Enhanced Upgrades

vSphere+ introduces a way to have a low touch, streamlined vCenter upgrade procedure with a significantly reduced downtime. From a cloud console, you can easily trigger vCenter upgrades with confidence and low downtime. Customers will receive a notification in the cloud console letting them know an upgrade is available (Just like we get notifications for our mobile devices now!!!), and from the cloud console, prerequisites can be easily checked, and upgrades triggered with the click of a button.

vSphere+ Upgrades

 

These are just a few of the features available on this first version, but there are MANY more to come. This is just the beginning and I’m excited to start this journey with you.

Check back for a lot more content in the next few months and also find me at VMware Explore for further information.

Other Resources:

Announcing vSphere+ and vSAN+ to deliver benefits of cloud to on-premises workloads

vSphere+ Overview

vSphere+ Hands-on-Lab 

 

 

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