Remember Project Arctic?

With vSphere+ and vSAN+, VMware is bringing Project Arctic — announced last year at VMworld — to life. Recall that the company described Project Arctic as the “next step” for vSphere in a multicloud world.

“Hundreds of thousands of customers run vSphere and many still have large on-premises deployments that continue to deliver value,” Krish Prasad, SVP and GM, Cloud Platform Business, VMware, wrote in an October 2021 blog. “What if they could continue leveraging their existing investments as well as toolsets and domain expertise, but still benefit from the expanded cloud capabilities with VMware Cloud for a complete hybrid cloud experience?”

Project Arctic aims to achieve that by natively integrating cloud connectivity into vSphere. This also makes hybrid cloud the “default” operating model, VMware said.

The work coming out of Project Arctic work targets IT teams — channel partners’ customers, in most cases.