Oracle Cloud: The Ideal Platform for VMware with Control, Security and Predictability

At VMworld 2021, along with a lively fireside chat between VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram and Oracle CTO Larry Ellison, we were proud to share the latest updates on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, discuss our alliance and broadening roadmap with VMware, show off an exciting technology demo on Arm-based servers and showcase some recent joint customers.

Two years ago at OpenWorld 2019, Oracle and VMware executives Clay Magouyrk and John Gilmartin announced a mutual technical support agreement for Oracle products running on VMware environments and introduced the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Since we launched the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution last year, we now have over 50 customers who have deployed over 10,000 cores and this momentum continues to grow. Some of our recent successful customers include the following companies:

Rumo Logistica is a major railway company that runs approximately 14K kilometers of rail lines in Brazil, transporting 26% of all grains and 30% of the world’s sugar exported from the country. They migrated their data centers to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and VMware estate to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution to manage their railway operations, supplies, billing, and human resources workloads. Rumo selected Oracle Cloud VMware Solution for its full-fidelity VMware experience without making any architectural changes. As a result, they achieved 20% reduction in infrastructure cost. They completed migration to OCI in just three months, with zero business interruption. Rumo is a 24/7 operation and couldn’t afford any downtime. They’re the first railroad in Brazil to enable digital transformation to operate 100% in the cloud.

Maxim’s is a Hong Kong-based food and beverage company that operates over 1,700 stores throughout Asia. Maxim’s needed Oracle Cloud VMware Solution for extra capacity and business continuity of critical applications in their on-premises VMware estate. They chose Oracle because of its longstanding strategic partnership and consistent post-sales support. With Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, they dramatically improved systems capacity to meet the infrastructure needs of 1,700 stores and scalability for growth. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution saved 65% operational costs compared to on-premises VMware deployment. Disaster protection for production systems gave Maxim’s a reduction in their recovery time objective to about five minutes.

TIM Brasil is a Brazilian telecommunications operator with over 61 million customers. They needed a VMware solution to adopt a cloud-first strategy for digitizing their business applications while maintaining compatibility with existing on-premises systems. They selected Oracle Cloud VMware Solution for its compatibility with VMware SnapClone and HCX. Both features were a critical decision factor in their analysis. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution enabled TIM Brasil to quickly migrate into the cloud and maintain compatibility with Red Hat Linux-their OS standard.

Oracle is focused on innovation, flexibility, customer choice. We continue to deepen how Oracle and VMware are working together. This week at VMworld, we’re announcing preview support for VMware Horizon on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. We’re also announcing upcoming support for VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid natively within OCI and Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE).

With those exciting announcements, we have several upcoming capabilities and features for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. First, we want to offer more flexibility for customers to choose Compute shapes that more precisely match their workloads and applications. These choices include a smaller number of cores, more compute shapes and higher memory configurations using the latest 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, AMD Compute options plus introduction for NVIDIA GPU support.

Second, we will soon support new storage configurations to complement our current NVMe SSD vSAN storage offering. We plan to certify external storage options with OCI File Storage and Block Storage services to provide more flexibility for customers to scale storage to meet their requirements.

Third, we’re announcing upcoming support for a single node variant of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. This configuration is ideal for non-production deployments such as development and testing and training environments that don’t require three-node clusters.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is built on the foundation of OCI, the first public cloud built from the ground up to be a better cloud and architected for every enterprise application and workload. Oracle’s VMworld sessions feature top engineering leadership from across OCI that explains the innovations that enable us to offer a native VMware experience in the cloud with the following features:

• Control over the full software and hardware stack with super-user, root access to policies, settings, access and upgrades. Customers may deploy Oracle Cloud VMware Solution in 30 cloud regions and on-premises with Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer.
• Security with a zero-trust, security-first cloud architecture. Each customer tenancy is an isolated customer environment using our innovative off-box virtualization and L2 network virtualization. We’re the first cloud provider to have a VMware solution with FedRAMP High and DISA I5 compliance attestations.
• Predictability with rapid migration without architectural changes, high application performance and consistent pricing around the world with the lowest-in-industry data egress charges.

We’re also pleased to have several customers join us at VMworld to talk about their experiences with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. We’re also excited to showcase our technical capabilities with a demonstration of the technical preview of ESXi Arm Edition running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Ampere A1 Arm-based compute service and OCI Block Volume storage. While this configuration isn’t supported or licensed for production, it’s a great example of what’s possible and easy with the right engineering and innovation in a public cloud.

Check out Oracle’s sessions at VMworld 2021

Voices of VMworld: Larry Ellison, Oracle executive chair and CTO, and VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram

Larry Ellison, Oracle executive chair and CTO, and Raghu Raghuram, VMware CEO, discuss current cloud momentum with industry trends, customer success with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and future technology directions. (Session VI3406)

Oracle Cloud: The ideal platform for VMware and a multicloud journey

Bev Crair, SVP of Compute, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Enterprises, institutions, and agencies select Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to operate all types of apps and workloads in a global, multicloud environment. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is the ideal platform for VMware with security, predictability, and control. This session features discussions with two successful customers using Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. (Session MCL3082S)

Enterprise cloud evolution with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Matt Leonard, Vice President, Product Management—Compute, Oracle and Max Romanenko, Vice President, Software Engineering, Oracle

Oracle’s innovative, clean-slate approach to designing IT infrastructure elements resulted in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, a high-performance cloud platform that addresses the need for every enterprise application and workload, and an ideal cloud for VMware. This session features a demonstration of VMware vSphere operating on ARM processors in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. (Session MCL3083S)

Unleash the power of Oracle Cloud

Jeffrey Eberhard, Director, VMware Solutions, Oracle and Wei Wang, Senior Director of Product Marketing, VMware

Learn how VMware and Oracle accelerate enterprise cloud-first strategies with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Topics include a solution overview, key use cases, migration planning, common challenges, and tips for success. (Session MCL1707)

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution: Live discussion with VMware and Oracle

Clive D’Souza, Senior Director Engineering, Oracle, and Hein Hellemons, SVP of WW Cloud Sales, VMware. (Session MCL3084S)

Explore all of the Oracle-related VMworld sessions