As you very well know, the IT infrastructure of the last few years have been very influenced by migrations to the cloud with the big names pushing for it like VMware with their multi-cloud strategy. In many instances, it may make sense from a financial perspective to transition workloads to the cloud in order to convert CAPEX expenses and complex in-house operations into OPEX expenses.
However, many organizations can’t or do not want to do so and decide to keep operating on-premise infrastructure for a number of reasons, often related to data confidentiality and security which is slowly being addressed by sovereign cloud offering. Other use cases simply include edge computing, performance and latency requirement where the cloud equivalent would be way too expensive to run in a sustainable fashion which is simplified by the cost predictability offered by on-premise deployments.
For that reason, VMware decided to create a new offering that provides cloud-like functionalities to on-premise workloads in private datacenters, the best of both worlds in a way.
On-premise challenges
The challenges that drove the development of the vSphere+ and vSAN+ offerings are mostly in relation to the general nature of on-premise deployments. Distributing and managing VMware SDDCs across multiple sites is already doable and has been for many years now. However, while you can get pretty close to it, the added complexity and management overhead still make it quite a long way to Cloud services’ efficient manageability and flexibility.
As opposed to how it used to be, the bulk of research and development and major feature releases now happen in the cloud first and are later ported to on-premise products, sometimes. Meaning you might be missing out on sweet SaaS-like functionality.
Bring the cloud to your datacenter
Similar to how Cloud Services like vRealize Cloud work, a VMware cloud gateway appliance that is deployed on-premise links your vCenter Servers to the VMware Cloud Console where you can manage all your environments across the board from a single pane of glass. You manage your virtual machines and kubernetes workloads from the cloud console but they remain on-premise on your own hardware.
During VMworld 2021, VMware announced Project Arctic at the stage of technology preview back then to bring cloud connectivity into vSphere on-premise. vSphere+ is the first step to Project Arctic, which is a bigger vision of connecting on-prem to not just VMware cloud, but all the clouds while keeping workloads on-premises.
This will probably remind you of Microsoft’s Windows Server 2022 announcement that removed the free Hyper-V edition, making management in the cloud with Azure Stack HCI a requirement to generate recurring revenue.
The Cloud Console centralizes tasks across vCenter servers regardless of their geographical and logical location. Management is simplified with a bunch of Admin Services such as:
- vCenter lifecycle management service: Simplifies and shortens time to upgrade vCenter servers. It uses the same technology used previously in VMC on AWS with the Reduced Downtime Upgrade Feature (RDU) where a simple click on ‘Update Now’ will trigger operation. It should only take minutes and you can easily roll back if something goes wrong
- Global inventory service: Visualize and report on resources across the entire vSphere+ estate with all the clusters, hosts, VMs… You get the usual metrics with CPU, memory, storage and such
- Event view service: If you’ve used vCenter extensively you will know how bad the event viewer is. vSphere+ claims this service will let you get all events and alerts across your vSphere+ environments. Call it a quality-of-life improvement
- Security health check service: While Skyline does a good job at alerting you and tracking the health of your environment, vSphere+ displays security exposures across all vSphere+ infrastructures such as idle SSH sessions or deprecated SSL protocols which can in turn trigger remedial actions
- Provision VM service: Similar to how VMware Cloud Director offers self-service provisioning, you can quickly create VMs from the cloud console without the need to login to several vCenter servers
- Configuration management service: Sometimes vCenter configurations can drift from the original baseline. With this service, This feature tracks configuration drift for vCenter servers
Admin services being the “SaaS services” that simplify management operations, Developer Services are the other type of SaaS services that will benefit developers as it focuses on provisioning and running resources. Note that there is nothing new in those as they’ve been added to the vSphere product over the last few years, they were just branded with a “Service” tag as far as I can tell. They include:
- Integration with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service to run cloud native apps to give developers on-demand access to on-premises Kubernetes clusters
- The VM service lets you create VMs using Kubernetes style commands and APIs for those edge cases that require a combination of VMs and containers
- Network service provides a management layer for virtual routers, load balancers, firewall rules and manages switching access for VMs and Kubernetes workloads
- The storage service, which I can only assume is backed by vSphere CNS (Cloud Native Storage) lets you manage persistent storage for containers and virtual machines on block and file storage
- Tanzu integrated services offer logging, registry, monitoring, and ingress capabilities for Kubernetes
- Tanzu Mission Control Essentials which is a platform to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters with all the observability, troubleshooting and resiliency bells and whistles
Adoption
As like any other cloud subscription, vSphere+ and vSAN+ is made easy for the customers to purchase. No need to rock the boat, all you need is to connect the vCenter servers to the VMware Cloud Gateway Appliance. You can then convert your existing licenses to vSphere+ subscriptions.
While this does raise the question of the ROI of the licenses you already paid for, it does bring the benefit of not having to deal with licenses.
Note that you can then activate add-on services to add Disaster recovery, ransomware protection, cloud burst capacity, capacity planning and others to the mix.
Conclusion
This announcement being effectively a subscription model to manage VMware environments from the cloud, the communications around it were wrapped with a fair amount of marketing fluff from which it can prove tricky to identify the actual real world technical benefits for the end user. Granted this felt like it is targeted more towards decision makers and MSPs, IT departments and VI admins can still make use of it and save a bit of time on their daily operations. As a VI admin who performed my fair share of vCenter updates, the idea of an automated upgrade with the click of a button does appeal to me quite a bit.
Realistically, I don’t see vSphere+ and vSAN+ as a groundbreaking announcement that will revolutionize this space or reduce the complexity of SDDCs as the underlying infrastructure will remain the same. While it is definitely an interesting initiative that should simplify operations, I would be lying if I didn’t raise an eyebrow as it reminded me very much of Microsoft’s controversial announcement of Windows Server 2022 making Azure Stack HCI the only sustainable way to run on-premise workload. Let’s hope VMware doesn’t end up making vSphere+ a mandatory requirement in the end like Microsoft did.
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