Announcing the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution spring release with new flexible standard shapes

In 2022, we introduced E4 Dense compute shapes powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors in 32-, 64-, and 128-core configurations to provide a more cost-effective path to the public cloud. It was a home run for customers with Oracle databases and computationally intense VMware workloads to rapidly migrate to the cloud with vSphere-based Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. 

Customers who adopted these shapes were able to migrate to the cloud at half the cost of VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Service (AWS) and improve transaction processing times. For example, TIM Brasil achieved 25% faster transaction processing times, and Vivo Telefonica was able to speed up new service offerings by 30% and reduce expenses by 25%.

Since our launch, we’ve been busy talking to many of our customers and partners, getting feedback on how we can improve their experience. We heard that, while dense shapes deliver a lot of processing power, you also need support for small- and medium-sized workloads and greater agility to avoid over- or underprovisioning compute, memory, and storage.

Spring ’23 release features

We’re excited to announce our Spring ’23 release, which includes support for flexible Standard shapes with independent scaling of compute and storage.

• New Standard shapes (X7, X9, and E4): Powered by 3rd Gen Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution standard shapes support a wide variety of extra-small to extra-large core configurations to right-size your VMware workloads. CPU expansion packs are available in 50%, 75%, and 100% of available CPU capacity, allowing you to balance cost-performance requirements.

  • BM.Standard3: X9-based standard 3rd gen Intel Xeon Platinum 8358 processor (formerly named Ice Lake), base frequency 2.6 GHz, max turbo frequency 3.4 GHz, available in 16-, 32-, 48-, 64- core configurations, with 1-TB RAM, and 100-Gbps network bandwidth.

  • BM.Standard2.52: X7-based standard Intel Xeon Platinum 8167M, base frequency 2.0 GHz, max turbo frequency 2.4 GHz available in 12-, 26-, 38-, 52-core configurations with 768-GB RAM, and 50-Gbps network bandwidth.

  • BM.StandardE4: E4-based standard compute. 3rd gen AMD EPYC 7J13 processor, base frequency 2.55 GHz, max boost frequency 3.5 GHz, available in 32-, 64-, 96-, 128 core configurations, with 2-TB RAM and 100-Gbps network bandwidth.

• Oracle Cloud VMware Solution GPU compute beta: Oracle Cloud VMware Solution BM.GPU.GU1.4 compute shape is powered by four NVIDIA A10 Tensor Core GPUs, BM.GPU.GU1.4 also runs on Intel 3rd gen Xeon Platinum 8358 BareMetal host with 1 TB of RAM, 100 Gbps of overall network bandwidth, 7.68 TB of raw NVMe internal disk, and support for up to 1 PB of external block storage. Key use cases for this solution include graphics accelerated VDI with VMware Horizon, Microsoft RDS or Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. Beta program signup is available for a limited time.

• VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure certification: Oracle and VMware help cloud service providers (CSPs) modernize their networks by seamlessly incorporating Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), including OCI Dedicated Region as an integral part of their 5G network function architecture. Integrated with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, VMware Telco Cloud Platform – Public Cloud can help deliver greater flexibility for CSPs to design and implement their end-to-end networks with rich ecosystem of VMware verified network functions.

• VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Enterprise Edition) certification: Application delivery services with local load balancing, global server load balancing (GSLB) and web application firewall (WAF) for workloads are now supported with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. For more information about how to get started with Avi on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, check out this blog from VMware.

• Expanded global regions: Since its launch, you can find Oracle Cloud VMware Solution in more locations than any other VMware hyperscaler offering. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is available globally in 42 cloud regions and 22 countries, with dual regions available in 10 countries and 12 Azure Interconnect regions. Our globally available cloud regions offer proximity, meet data sovereignty requirements, and provide true disaster recovery with geographically distributed cloud regions in every country. OCI serves commercial businesses, the US and UK government, and the US Department of Defense with distinct regions that must meet specific compliance and tenancy requirements. Most recently, new commercial regions include Serbia, Chicago, Mexico (Querétaro), Spain (Madrid), and a second region in France (Paris).

Introducing standard shapes (X7, X9, and E4)

Standard shapes (X7, X9, and E4) available with 50%, 75%, and 100% CPU expansion packs address a wide range of VMware workloads including: web apps, small databases, disaster recovery, and development environments, and more. This availability allows you to correctly size compute and storage without adding more hosts, achieving a cost-effective path to the public cloud in the following scenarios:

• Migrate general-purpose workloads that benefit from the per-core price advantage

• Reduce the license costs based on per-core pricing by starting with an extra-small core configuration

• Build a more cost-effective VMware solution with highly available OCI Block Storage

• Improve price-performance with low latency by communicating within the same L2 network, from the host to the SAN in the same VLAN

We’re honored to partner with many customers, such as Prophecy International, a global cybersecurity and business intelligence software provider, to migrate the entire VMware environment to the cloud using Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

“Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s new Compute shape offerings and flexible infrastructure enable us to address a wider range of VMware use cases in the cloud, including extra-small and large cluster sizes,” said Steve Challans, CISO of Prophecy International. “OCI’s breadth of configuration options offers us the flexibility to scale our workloads as our application needs change. With flexible storage options, we can also reconfigure block volumes without disrupting our business operations. Overall, we’re reaching new levels of performance for our VMware workloads in the cloud.”

Unlike other cloud-based VMware solutions, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is a customer-managed solution with OCI bare metal compute and L2 network virtualization. This setup allows VMware workloads to communicate within the same L2 network, which is vital for applications such as file sharing, video streaming, gaming, and security applications. You get zero hops for the lowest latency when microseconds count.

Other cloud-based VMware solutions use L3 networking, which adds latency with each hop. iSCSI is very transactional and chatty. L3 networking with a managed offering means higher latency. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution has zero hops from the host to SAN in the same VLAN, meaning lower latency.

Independently scale compute and storage with standard shapes (X7, X9, and E4)

New Oracle Cloud VMware Solution standard shape configurations support the vSphere management datastore with highly available OCI Block Storage. The default configuration requires one management datastore per software-defined data center (SDDC) with VMFS 8-TB block storage starting at 10 volume performance units (VPUs) with 25K IOPS per volume.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution standard shapes use OCI Block Volume service to attach to the ESXi hosts as an iSCSI Datastore. After connecting to the host, you can use the volume like any shared disk, disconnect it, and attach it to another ESXi host in another SDDC without losing data. OCI block volumes cannot be shared across SDDCs or VMware vSphere clusters within an SDDC. Block Volumes can be created in sizes ranging from 50 GB to 32 TB in 1 GB increments. You can have a max of 32 Block Volumes, scaling to 1 petabyte of storage in a cluster for storage-hungry workloads.

OCI VPUs give you precise control over the application’s target volume performance. VPUs allocate more resources to a volume, increasing IOPS, GB, and throughput per GB. As a result, you can scale performance up or down, providing significant cost savings for workloads that don’t require increased performance. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution supports up to 50 VPUs per block volume. Block storage offers vSphere-based Oracle Cloud VMware Solution customers with increased flexibility, industry-leading price-performance, lower costs, native disaster recovery capabilities, and external storage options.

OCI block volumes are designed to provide highly available and durable storage for mission-critical workloads and applications. Multiple copies of data are stored redundantly across multiple storage servers with built-in repair mechanisms. The Block Volume service is designed to provide 99.99% annual durability for block and boot volumes. As a best practice, we recommend that you make regular backups to protect against the failure of an availability domain.

Up to 42% performance gains with X9-based Intel 3rd gen Xeon Platinum processor

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution X9-based Standard3 instance, powered by the Intel Xeon Platinum 8358 processor, with base frequency 2.6 GHz, max turbo frequency 3.4 GHz, 1-TB RAM, and 100-Gbps network bandwidth, delivers performance gains of up to 42% over the previous generation.

“Customers using VMware on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure require the most advanced systems to support their ever-growing needs,” said Anurag Handa, Intel vice president and general manager of hyperscale and strategic customers. “Intel and Oracle Cloud have been coinnovating together on multiple generations of VMware optimized shapes that offer some of the latest processor accelerators resulting in up to 42% over the previous generation. The built-in scalability and security optimizations are well suited to support these latest VMware customer workloads.”

The Xeon Platinum 8358 processor comes with built in accelerators and security features, such as Software Gurad Extensions (SGX) and AVX-512 vector extensions. With Intel AVX-512 vector extensions, you can accelerate performance for a wide range of compute-intensive workloads, such as AI, high-performance computing (HPC), security, imaging, and networking. Intel Deep Learning Boost includes Intel AVX-512 VNNI (Vector neural network instructions), which is an extension to the Intel AVX-512 instruction set. It can combine three instructions into one for processing, which further unleashes the computing potential of next-generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors.

Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) helps protects data in use through unique application isolation technology. Protect selected code and data from modification using hardened enclaves with Intel SGX.

Want to learn more?

These new flexible Compute shapes can help your team scale your VMware workloads more easily without over- or underprovisioning compute, memory, and storage. To get started with standard shapes, contact your OCI cloud architect, and check out the following Oracle Cloud VMware Solutiion resources:

• Product documentation

• Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (Oracle)

• Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (VMware)

• Compute shape sizer

• Price list

• FAQ Page

• Oracle CloudWorld 2023 information

• How-to Guide