7 ways to optimise business IT infrastructure with VMware vSphere+
Find out how the vSphere+ multi-cloud workload platform delivers cloud benefits to on-premises workloads.
The rapid shift to multi-cloud and subscription-based environments, along with the adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) operating and consumption models, helps organisations to realise new operational efficiencies, performance optimisation and cost benefits.
VMware vSphere+ Subscription brings the functionality of VMware Cloud to on-premises infrastructure deployments. vSphere+ reduces infrastructure maintenance costs, optimises operations and speeds up security responses.
1. Server Consolidation
As the VM environment becomes more complex, maintaining visibility or planning capacity can be challenging without insight into how to maximise future performance.
Businesses can consolidate multiple physical servers into a single virtualised server with vSphere+. This enables companies to run more apps on fewer machines, which also reduces spend and offers easier to run management, with added gains and efficiency. In addition, server consolidation makes it easier to avert or recover from disasters.
2. Resource Optimisation
Business growth brings challenges. The advantage of vSphere+ is how easy it is to meet evolving IT and application needs. Workloads running on-premises can access benefits including locality, low latency, performance and predictable costs, but can miss out on useful cloud innovations.
vSphere+ combines industry-leading virtualisation technology, with an enterprise-ready Kubernetes environment and high-value cloud services. This supports businesses to transform existing on-premises deployments into SaaS-enabled infrastructure, helping organisations to centralise management, supercharge productivity and accelerate innovation.
3. Enhanced Disaster Recovery
VMware vSphere+ offers robust disaster recovery capabilities, including vSphere Replication, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR).
VCDR protects on-premises mission-critical VMs by replicating them to the cloud and protecting them from disasters and ransomware. vSphere+ centralises management through the VMware Cloud Console to enhance operational efficiency and integrates a wide range of add-on hybrid cloud services to expedite disaster recovery and ransomware protection.
4. Improved Security and Compliance
As you might expect, VMware vSphere+ provides advanced security features, including vSphere Security Hardening, Secure Boot and vSphere AppDefense.
A security health check service evaluates the security posture of your entire vSphere infrastructure, providing peace of mind by identifying potential weaknesses or exposures. In addition, the VMware Support Team are only granted specific vCenter Server monitoring, without access to customer workloads. Meanwhile, customers have visibility into which actions are planned, which are currently being executed and previously executed plans.
For on-premises managed vSphere components, the VMware vSphere+ subscription creates a shared responsibility security model, which minimises friction, enabling users to easily set up, monitor and revoke permissions.
5. Simplified Management and Automation
vSphere+ offers centralised management through vCenter Server, which provides a unified interface to manage virtualised environments. The vCenter Server appliance contains all the Platform Services Controller services from earlier releases, preserving previous functionality, authentication, certificate management and licensing.
vSphere+ is VMware’s virtualisation platform, transforming data centres into aggregated computing infrastructures, which include CPU, storage and networking resources. These infrastructures are managed as a unified operating environment, providing you with the tools to administer the data centres which participate within that environment.
6. Scalability and Flexibility
Operations management sits at the top of the vSphere environment, offering invaluable foresight into intelligent growth. The dashboard provides top level, streamlined control, managing the entire virtual machine environment, so you know how to allocate resources and maximise performance.
The next step in virtualisation, vSphere+ provides analytic reports into current and future capacity, providing the ability to grow and scale to accommodate workloads.
Simplify the lifecycle management of your vCenter instances by making updates with a single click and reduce the maintenance window so it’s easier to schedule updates sooner. Users also gain rapid access to new features and are able to address security vulnerabilities quickly. If a problem arises, simply roll back the update.
Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and vSphere High Availability (HA), can help businesses to dynamically allocate and balance computing resources based on workload demands. VMware vRealize Operations add-on service, provides both capacity planning and optimisation for infrastructure for current and future workload requirements.
7. Cloud Integration
VMware vSphere+ seamlessly integrates with cloud platforms such as VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Cloud Provider Program (VCPP) partners.
Businesses can consolidate management of all vSphere deployments through a centralised cloud console: VMware Cloud Console. DevOps teams can access IaaS services (ex. provisioning VMs, networking, setting up Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters), easily from the Cloud Consumption Interface, simplifying infrastructure setup across the vSphere estate through intuitive UIs and developer-friendly APIs, freeing time to focus on development efforts.
Businesses can simplify TKG cluster lifecycle and package management with API-driven Cluster Classes and Carvel to build on Kubernetes with confidence, improve the resilience of containerised workloads through availability zones and gain useful self-service access to IaaS services across vSphere cloud infrastructure from an intuitive cloud console.
Building upon advanced technology with vSphere+ provides access to a wide selection of cloud services and centralises management through the VMware Cloud Console. Workloads remain on-premises, running on ESXi hosts orchestrated by vCenter instances, just like traditional vSphere. 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. Admin services can then simplify global operations. Developer services can manage the Kubernetes environment and optional add-on hybrid cloud services can be purchased to extend the capabilities of vSphere+ even further.
