Broad-Cloud.NL

Last week I attended a technical session where the Oracle Cloud technology was discussed. My goal is to inform the VMware community about this great technology and value!

What is Oracle Cloud VMware Solution?

Let’s focus on the technology which Oracle currently offers (2nd generation cloud).

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is a service , introduced in 2019 by Oracle which allows you to run VMware natively on OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure), a Hybrid, Customer-Managed Cloud Solution

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a set of complementary cloud services that enable you to build and run a range of applications and services in a highly available hosted environment.  OCI provides high-performance compute capabilities (as physical hardware instances) and storage capacity in a flexible overlay virtual network that is securely accessible from your on-premises network.

OCVS provides the ability to seamlessly run VMware SDDC Stack on OCI.

This (SDDC) Software Defined Datacenter consist of vSphere, vSan and NSX.

By OCVS u get SSH (Root acces) and Oracle has NO ACCESS after the SDDC provisioning!

OCVS Highlights:

So what’s included?

For a production environment in the cloud, the following conditions apply:

A minimum of 3 Bare Metal Compute, (see flavors) and VMware Software based on vSphere, vSAN and NSX-T.

(Source: Oracle)

OCI Architecture

Oracle’s cloud architecture is providing a Fully isolated cloud management control plane.

This control plane offers a major advantage.

The Customer App & Data is fully isolated from Oracle’s multi tenant management.

No Oracle Cloud Software has to be present on the Customer’s server.

Use case: This can be a great use case for financial institutions or organizations that have security requirements and need compliance guidelines for audit purposes.

Customer App & Data share the same server with the cloud vendor’s multi tenant management.

(Source: Oracle)

The OCI control plane resides on SmartNics (which is NOT the NIC on the server).

This could be a very interesting use case for your workload, consider the business requirements of your organization.

Oracle Interconnect for Azure.

Let’s talk about the direct Interconnect between OCI and Microsoft Azure that provides <2ms latency for superior multicloud network performance. You can simply connect the Azure ExpressRoute with Oracle FastConnect, see

In this video you can learn how to setup this connection in less then 20 minutes.

(Source: Oracle)

Cost-effective connectivity
Zero data ingress/egress charges can provide significant cost savings.

High throughput
Integra LifeSciences uses the Interconnect to transfer terabytes of data nightly.

Compute Shapes

OCI offers many compute shapes and the portfolio will be expanded in the future.

See this blog for all the available shapes, like standard for general-purpose workloads, DenseIO shapes designed for large databases, High-performance computing (HPC) shapes designed for HPC workloads and Graphical processing unit (GPU) shapes are designed for hardware-accelerated workloads.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution offers general flexible compute instances that are available as X7 dense 52-core Intel Xeon and E4 dense 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors.

(Source: Oracle) Including the option to Customize shapes with 32-, 64-, and 128-core configurations.

Personally, I am very excited about the option to be able to scale CPU resources.

External storage

In the cloud, it is not common to make use of external storage, but there are many scenarios where this great technology can be key in cloud adoption.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Block Volume service lets you dynamically provision and manage (block) storage volumes . You can create, attach, connect, and move volumes, as well as change volume performance, as needed, to meet your storage, performance, and application requirements. After you attach and connect a volume to an instance, you can use the volume like a regular hard drive. You can also disconnect a volume and attach it to another instance without the loss of data.

By integrating this storage solution (NFS or Block volume), the cloud platform becomes extremely flexible and cost efficient. From now it is possiable to scale only compute resources independently of the storage requirement.

Another great feature is the option to define a performance level.

Alternative vendors

VMware has a strategic partnership with 6 of these hyperscalers and all of these 6 public clouds offer VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) stack on top of their global infrastructure:

OCI Global Coverage

Oracle Cloud offers services from 41 public cloud regions in 22 countries. Each Oracle Cloud region offers a consistent set of more than 100 cloud services designed to run any application.

(Source: Oracle)

Use Cases

There are many use cases perfectly suited for this service, including:

Migrate On-Premises Oracle database to the cloud.

Deploy a single-host SDDC to provide a (temporary) test environment.

Provide a Disaster Recovery site with super low bandwidth costs.

Unleash cloud networking by a Layer 2 network virtualization, allowing applications written for physical networks to run without alteration in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Connect directly to OCI by Fastconnect, choose an appropriate port speed and pay a consistent predictable price each month.

Be in control of all running workloads in the SDDC stack including complete control over the cloud stack

Flexibly sizing Scaling of storage capacity : No need to add extra node. Simply add external storage

Connect VMs to the same subnet as a PaaS service, with extremely low latency

Disaster Recovery

VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is tested and certified for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

You can use a single host SDDC as a lower-cost entry point and perform Disaster Recovery Evaluation with VMware Site Recovery .

(Source: Oracle)

For Deployment Strategies and other best practices, see this great guideline document.

Personal opinion

I am very excited about the SSH/ROOT access to the VMware stack (an authorization that is nog provided from the competition)

But also the ability to consume native services on bare metal, file/block storage and the network connectivity features, which can provides low latency acces to Native Microsoft Azure services.

Deepdive and Certification

In case you want to expend your knowledge there are awesome resources available.

Oracle offers a great training program including a certificate and badge at no cost.

Pro tip: Visit the Oracle University site, and follow the training “Become an OCI Foundations Associate” and get certified for free!

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Foundations certification is for individuals who intend to demonstrate fundamental knowledge of public cloud services provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This certification is for candidates with non-technical backgrounds, such as those involved in selling or procuring cloud solutions, as well as those with a technical background who want to validate their foundational-level knowledge around core OCI services.

This exam does not require any hands-on technical experience and is not a prerequisite for taking any other OCI certifications.

#Let’s make the most of a Multi-Cloud world!

Disclamer:

This blog is based on my personal title and assumptions. No rights can be derived from this blog.