Common Migration Use Cases for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Last week, we announced Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, the industry’s first bare-metal, fully customer-managed VMware solution, offering complete administrative access. Today, I want to share some of the customer use cases for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

When customers are considering data center migrations, one of the core considerations is how to move existing infrastructure efficiently. VMware provides numerous methods to allow customers the ability to migrate virtual machines (VMs) between sets of infrastructures, all of which are available for use within the Oracle Cloud VMware solution.

Use Cases

The following diagram shows how a customer can migrate their entire environment from on-premises to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution using, VMware HCX. VMware HCX establishes the pairing between the two VMware environments and allows customers to accomplish migrations, potentially without any service disruption.

You might want to simply extend you existing VMware environments or migrate portions of their environment to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, while maintaining an on-premises presence. We recognize that customers make this choice for any number of reasons: regulatory, governance, or even data or operational locality. The following example shows how you can establish a hybrid solution using VMware HCX. You can configure hybrid software-defined data centers (SDDCs) using VMware HCX, establish pairing between source (on-premises) and destination (customer’s Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy), and extend any needed networks, and deploy virtual appliances on both sides. Once set up, you can move workloads bidirectionally, on both sites, selecting the appropriate group of virtual machines to move between sites.

Finally, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution enables you to proactively plan for active disaster recovery scenarios in case a failure occurs in a customer primary data center. You can define a disaster recovery plan and automate it using VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). Is there’s a primary SDDC failure, the VMware workloads are immediately accessible from Oracle Cloud VMware Solution environment. You can build a new disaster recovery plan, replace an existing plan, or complement an existing plan using Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

How We’re Different

Even with the three scenarios, customers still want to know how we’re different from the other providers. The following table highlights some of the major differences between Oracle Cloud VMware Solution and our competitors:

We focused on exceeding our customers’ expectations when compared to other cloud vendors. You can deploy Oracle Cloud VMware Solution workloads in under 2.5 hours, which we’re looking to further reduce, as opposed to the weeks it takes on AWS. Also, competing VMware cloud offerings are limited to colocated, managed services, which fail to meet the level of control, flexibility, and cloud integration required by enterprise customers. For example, VMware Cloud on AWS only supports and provides the latest versions of the VMware software, while most enterprises employ n-1 strategies to ensure compatibility with large application portfolios. VMware Cloud on AWS is also on infrastructure and data centers that are separate from those used by AWS, introducing concerns about connectivity and throughput limitations between these two separate solutions.

Unlike all other cloud providers, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution provides native connectivity to other Oracle Cloud services in a region, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure VCN infrastructure. With less than 1-ms roundtrip latency and the ability to interact with virtually all Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services without crossing network boundaries, the deployment and integration of Oracle Cloud-native and VMware-based solutions becomes as simple as defining endpoints. Network performance and complex routing considerations disappear.

To access Azure database services, Azure VMware Solution customers have to use ExpressRoute, manually set up their VNet peering connections, introducing latency, stability concerns, and management overhead, invalidating many production workloads. When using Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, you simply deploy the database wherever you want, then initiate the connection—no additional work required.

Customers also get the added benefit of a single consolidated bill from Oracle, which includes Oracle Cloud VMware Solution as another line item, along with the other cloud services. All other providers require separate contracting and billing, further separating VMware from what they consider their core offerings. We believe that simplifying the procurement experience is another way of furthering our ethos focused on customers and showing our belief that integrating solutions provides customers with better experiences than separating them.

In Conclusion...

As I reflect back on the many months of discussions with our customers listening to their feedback, listening to their suggestions, and understanding their need, it truly has been a humbling experience. We believe we have created the best public cloud VMware solution for the most demanding workloads of our customers, in the most secure, scalable manner for their migration journey. To get started, see the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.