What is Oracle Cloud VMware Solution?

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) provides high performance dedicated hardware using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), running the full VMware software stack. Announced August 2020, Existing VMware and Oracle customers can now take advantage of:

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model with VMware overlay – abstracting functionality into the software for the customer to control, whilst consuming the underlying infrastructure as a service. This removes the overhead of traditional data centre maintenance tasks such as hardware and firmware patching, or failure remediation.
• Cloud migrations with reduced risk and operational continuity – example use cases include data centre exits, data centre scale out, and disaster recovery or increased availability.
• Hybrid applications and outcome focused refactoring – VMware workloads can run natively on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, but can also be refactored gradually over time, or where there are clear business drivers and priorities in doing so.
• Secure single tenancy infrastructure – tier 3 and 4 secure cloud data centres, as well as an exclusive dual-region Government Cloud for the UK public sector in London and Newport; connected through a high speed private network.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution wraps up the automated deployment and configuration of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) onto physical hardware in Oracle’s cloud data centres. VCF is a standardised architecture made up of VMware’s market leading Software-Defined Data Centre (SDDC) stack, consisting of:

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is priced per OCPU for physical nodes, and that includes the full service wrap, hardware, support, and VMware licensing. VMware’s HCX capabilities are also included, and features like L2 network extension combined with VCF provide seamless migrations of VMware workloads to the cloud. This goes a step beyond not having to refactor or rehost, it means not changing any of the virtual machine file format or network settings. It also means a common software based infrastructure across on-premises and the cloud, which infrastructure administrators continue to manage using their existing tools and skills.

OCVS is deployed to the customers existing Oracle Cloud account using an existing Virtual Cloud Network (VCN). Virtual machines residing in the SDDC can then integrate into native cloud services, like Oracle RAC, Exadata, and Database Cloud Services, using the Oracle Cloud backbone network. Along with full control over the Oracle Cloud account, the customer retains full administrative/root access within the VMware stack too, and this means end-to-end control over the environment, with the ability to implement zero trust security protocols and policies.

During the deployment process, OCVS asks for the region for hosting the SDDC. An Oracle Cloud region is a geographic area containing at least 1, but currently being built out to 3 availability domains. An availability domain (AD) is a data centre or site, and within it are 3 fault domains used to spread workloads across hardware and racks to prevent against common failures. The vSAN element of VCF will replicate storage between physical hosts for high availability across fault domains.

Although the management of the underlying infrastructure hardware is carried out by Oracle, the VMware stack is managed by the customer; giving them the choice of product versions to run and when to upgrade. This guarantees full interoperability with existing third party solutions, like backups, monitoring, and security products, whilst reducing the risk of cloud migrations and data breaches. At the same time, removing the burden of hardware lifecycle management means engineers can focus on service improvements and project delivery.

A minimum of 3 and maximum of 64 physical nodes can be deployed in each vSphere cluster, using the bare metal (BM).DennseIO2.52 instance type. Each instance comes with 156 OCPUs, 2304 GB RAM, and 153 TB NVMe raw storage.

To read more about OCVS take a look at the Oracle documentation, as well as Simon Long’s blog where you can see an OCVS deployment and example integration with OCI services.

If you’re interested in relocating VMware workloads to public cloud check out The Complete Guide to VMware Hybrid Cloud. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is the latest VMware Cloud Foundation hyperscaler offering, accelerating cloud migrations through familiar technologies and investments. Oracle and OCVS complements VMware partnerships with AWS (VMware Cloud on AWS), Microsoft (Azure VMware Solution), and Google (Google Cloud VMware Engine), allowing organisations to select the correct public cloud for their VMware workloads.