Historically, VMware vSphere has been made available in three major editions based on the features they unlock: Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. There also have been editions that cater to a lot of industry use cases such as ROBO, vSOM, Essentials, etc. for companies that don’t need all the enterprise features.
One of the challenges of having multiple versions of a product is to have unique features available in each of the versions that cater to specific use cases. This not only adds complexity to each release, but it also makes the decision making process harder for customers because of many choices.
A couple of years ago, VMware moved some features around to reduce the versions into just two (Standard and Enterprise Plus) and introduced vSphere Platinum for customers looking at adopting VMware Apdefense. Intrinsic security is very much a need for enterprise customers today and can be termed as a use case that would be needed for almost all customers who run vSphere in their environments.
What about customers who run specific use cases? Like analytics, Big data, AI/ML and High-Performance computing and don’t have a requirement for enterprise features that rest of the customers require or more?
vSphere scale-out edition was introduced to cater to such customers. VMware vSphere Scale-out edition is created to cater to extend the industry-leading virtualization platform for High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Big data use cases.
High-Performance Computing (HPC) currently powers most of the critical applications in every vertical of business that you can think of: Healthcare, Research, Engineering, Manufacturing, and the list goes on. Virtualizing HPC has a lot of benefits which is highlighted in this white paper that is based on the John Hopkins University.
Some of the key value proposition of running HPC on vSphere are:
- Enable More Flexibility and Agility
- Operational Efficiency
- Reduce Complexity
- Data Governance and Control of Sensitive Data