How vSphere+ Simplifies life of VM Admins

Just few days ago VMware has announced the completely new powerful solutions called as vSphere+ and vSAN+. This are addition to your existing vSphere environments & provides more insight & visibility. VMware vSphere+ and vSAN+ is a SaaS product which combines private cloud with public cloud. In this post we will see on How vSphere+ is different than regular vSphere.

Featured Sponsor

VMware vSphere is very commonly used solution for server virtualization which gives you complete new functionality for server deployment, configuration , management & high availability. In simple vSphere environment you will see everyone is using ESXi hosts & vCenter Server. You all are already aware what is ESXi host & what is vCenter Server so we don’t spend time into it.

Nowadays most companies have their vSphere infrastructure scattered or you can say distributed across various remote locations. Every location has vCenter Server to manage local vSphere environment. Problem here is that due to distributed environment sometimes it become difficult for IT Teams to login & check all vCenter Servers for their health, Inventory & status. IT team lacks end to end visibility into vSphere environment. It also becomes difficult for them to maintain the same configuration across the environments.

Now to solve this problem VMware has announced the vSphere+.

So What is vSphere+ ?

VMware vSphere+ is the multi-cloud workload platform that delivers highvalue cloud services for IT admins and developers to centralize management, supercharge productivity and accelerate innovation for traditional and next-gen applications. 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. Transform on-premises infrastructure with cloud integration to give them all the benefits of the cloud, while enhancing existing vSphere deployments in place.

Below you can see the simple architecture of vSphere+ environment:

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.

Key Benefits of vSphere+

Cloud Console:
Cloud Console is the centralized management on the cloud where IT admin can have all the vCenter Servers connected & visibility to it. Cloud Console that enables you to perform tasks in aggregate, across your vSphere estate, to significantly reduce your operational burden. For example, you can quickly understand your resource utilization across your entire vSphere estate, triage areas that need attention, and identify security weaknesses or exposure to ensure your environment is running optimally. You can also update vCenter instances with a single click, and in just a few minutes, reducing the operational effort and maintenance window required.

Flexible Subscription:
Purchase vSphere+ as a subscription for better budget management by shifting from a CapEx to OpEx consumption model. Reduce large up-front costs. Single SKU includes all components (vCenter instances, ESXi hosts), and Support. Now you don’t have to buy separate vCenter Server licenses. You can Deploy as many instances of vCenter as you need easily.

Global Monitoring of vSphere environment:
You can use Global inventory service to check on all vSphere environments & have complete insight into all your vSphere estate. With the help of Event view service you will get get a consolidated view of events and alerts to quickly triage areas that need attention across your vSphere estate. Security health check service will evaluate the security posture of your entire vSphere infrastructure to identify security problems or exposures.

Lifecycle Management service:
vCenter Lifecycle Management service makes on-premises vCenter updates a lot simpler and faster. When an update is available you can 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. This helps in reducing downtime & faster upgrades of vCenter Servers. This gives you more rapid access to newer versions features and address security vulnerabilities quickly.

VM Provisioning Service:
Imagine being able to create VMs from one portal to ANY vCenter regardless their physical location. How easy it is isn’t it ? With vSphere+ and vSAN+, you can leverage the cloud portal to deploy virtual machines to any of the registered vCenter Servers. 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. Now you can quickly provision any number of VMs from the VMware Cloud Console within any of your managed cluster.

Developer Services:
Developer services includes development related services such as Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Service, Storage Service, VM Service, Network Service, Tanzu integrated services & Tanzu mission control essentials. vSphere+, users can transform their existing vSphere-based infrastructure into an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment, unifying VMs and containers on a single platform.

Activate Add-on Services:
vSphere+ now allows you to activate Add-on cloud services provided by VMware. There are 2 services will be coming soon which are VMware Cloud Disaster Recover service & Ransomware Protection service. We may see in future new service being added as Add-on to provide you more features.

In day to day work of VM admins there is always situation when they are unable to find or connect to specific vCenter, any object is missed from maintaining inventory, struggling to keep up same configuration across the environment & lifecycle management.

So with the vSphere+ most of problems can be easily resolved where VM admins can easily have access to each & every vCenter Server through cloud console. They can easily see all the inventory objects using Global inventory in cloud console. VM admins can easily perform upgrades of vCenter server with minimal downtime & maintain same configuration across the environment. So all in all vSphere+ is very useful which can be utilized by organizations to overcome this challenges.

vSphere+ gives you cloud benefits as well so that you can go for hybrid cloud environment easily. And you can Add or Activate add-on services as and when required.

In case of costing as well vSphere+ offers you the flexible subscription services through which companies can easily move from CapEx to OpEx consumption model. Which will have Single SKU includes all components (vCenter instances, ESXi hosts), and Support.

You can checkout below links to know more about vSphere+ and vSAN+

VMware vSphere+ Multi Cloud Platform

vSphere+ and vSAN+ Frequently Asked Questions

That’s it for Today Friends. I Hope you liked reading this post & If you find anything more to be added or removed feel free to write it in our comments. If you find it useful You are Feel free to share this on social media to help others & spread knowledge.
If you have any query on any thing you are free to write it in our comments section & we will make sure to provide you the better solution as soon as possible.

Join Our LinkedIn Group to get Updates & Discussions : Mastering VMware.
Checkout our Facebook Group for discussions & more.
You can also Like & Share our Facebook Page for Latest Updates.