Recently announced, VMware vSphere+ and vSAN+ integrate Kubernetes with VMware virtualization technology to help transform on-premises workloads into SaaS-enabled infrastructure and simplify its management and evolution, says VMware.
On-premises deployments have a number of benefits, including locality, low latency, performance, and predictable cost. Where they fall short is usually on the side of flexibility and maintenance.
In many instances, customers’ vSphere environments are distributed across siloed locations, edge sites, and clouds leading to operational complexity and inefficient maintenance experience.
According to VMware, vSphere+ makes it possible to provision infrastructure on-premise with the same ease as is possible on the Cloud, for example by scaling services in and out based on demand. Central to vSphere+ is the integration between vCenter and the Cloud Console, which enables metadata collection and management in a centralized location.
This is made possible by vSAN+, which delivers vSAN storage services for on-premises deployments and represents the connection point between vCenter instances and the VMware Cloud for centralized management. Thanks to this connection, you can use higher-level services to access your on-premises as well as Cloud deployments, including admin, developer, and add-on services.
Admin services aim to simplify and streamline the overall management of the system, including for example lifecycle management to distribute and install updates; an inventory service to track all available resources such as clusters, hosts, VMs, and so on; an event viewer for alerts and other kinds of events; VM provisioning, to quickly create new VMs, and more.
Developer services, says VMware, bring the integration of vSphere with Kubernetes beyond what is available in VMware Tanzu, enabling the unification of VMs and Kubernetes containers. This means for example you can create VMs using Kubernetes commands and APIs, run containerized apps using a Kubernetes distribution integrated with vSphere, managing network connectivity for VMs and Kubernetes workloads, etc.
Finally, add-on services provide extended capabilities, such as VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, a solution to protect and recover mission-critical applications, which will be available soon.
VMware says they have defined an incremental and non-disruptive way to adopt vSphere+ which does not require migrating or moving any vCenter instances, both for vSphere and vSphere Enterprise Plus customers.
