Oracle Cloud VMware Solution with OCI block volumes

March 14, 2023 | 7 minute read
Thomas Thyen
Cloud VMware Solutions Specialist
Daniel Jamil
Cloud VMware Solutions Specialist
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When it comes to storage options for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, customers were previously limited to the primary storage option, VMware vSAN datastore, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) File Storage service as a secondary storage option. With the announced general availability of OCI block volumes for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, a new option for scaling Oracle Cloud VMware Solution clusters’ storage capacity is now available.

The latest storage technology that is now available with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is the OCI Block Volume service, which provides highly redundant and high-performance storage at a low cost. You can create OCI block volumes as internet small computer system interface (iSCSI) block volumes, attach them to the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution hosts, and use them as an iSCSI datastore to host virtual machines (VMs), store templates, ISOs, and so on. With features such as performance autotuning, automated backup and disaster recovery, and block storage cloning, you have access to high-performance, low-cost block storage for their VMware workloads on OCI.

OCI Block Volume lets you dynamically provision and manage block storage volumes. You can create, attach, connect, and move volumes and change volume performance as needed to meet your storage, performance, and application requirements. Volumes are only accessible to instances in the same availability domain.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution with OCI block volumes

With OCI block volumes attached to an Oracle Cloud VMware Solution cluster, you now have the option to build a hybrid storage scenario with VMware vSAN and OCI block volumes to scale out your existing Oracle Cloud VMware Solution clusters on the storage level without needing to deploy another bare metal host.

A graphic depicting the architecture for an Oracle Cloud VMware Solution deployment with OCI block volumes.

How Oracle Cloud VMware Solution scales with OCI block volumes

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution clusters with OCI block volumes attached can scale to a maximum of eight bare metal hosts, which is the attachment limit for a single OCI block volume. This expansion results in a total of eight Oracle Cloud VMware Solution clusters per software-defined data center (SDDC) with eight hosts per cluster and 32 block volumes per Oracle Cloud VMware Solution cluster.

A single block volume can have a maximum size of 32 TB, which allows an eight-node Oracle Cloud VMware Solution cluster with 32 block volumes attached to provide up to 1 PB of storage capacity for VMs, minus 10–20% capacity reserve per OCI Block Volume.

You can’t share OCI block volumes across Oracle Cloud VMware Solution clusters. OCI block volumes are always dedicated to the bare metal hosts running in an Oracle Cloud VMware Solution cluster.

A graphic depicting the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution cluster's relationship with OCI block volumes.

OCI Block Volume attachments to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution clusters

The following table demonstrates how you can attach OCI block volumes to clusters within an Oracle Cloud VMware Solution clusters SDDC. The block volumes aren’t shared across clusters because each cluster has a dedicated set of OCI block volumes attached with the maximum capacity of 1,024 TB (32 x 32 TB).

SDDC

Cluster

ESXi Host

OCI Block Volumes

Size

Cluster Storage

OCVS-SDDC-01

OCVS-SDDC-01-Cluster-01

ESXi-01 - ESXi-08

Block-Volume-01 - Block-Volume-32

32 TB

1,024 TB

OCVS-SDDC-01

OCVS-SDDC-01-Cluster-02

ESXi-09 - ESXi-16

Block-Volume-33 - Block-Volume-64

32 TB

1,024 TB

OCVS-SDDC-01

OCVS-SDDC-01-Cluster-03

ESXi-17 - ESXi-24

Block-Volume-65 - Block-Volume-96

32 TB

1,024 TB

OCVS-SDDC-01

OCVS-SDDC-01-Cluster-04

ESXi-25 - ESXi-32

Block-Volume-97 - Block-Volume-128

32 TB

1,024 TB

OCVS-SDDC-01

OCVS-SDDC-01-Cluster-05

ESXi-33 - ESXi-40

Block-Volume129 - Block-Volume-160

32 TB

1,024 TB

OCVS-SDDC-01

OCVS-SDDC-01-Cluster-06

ESXi-41 - ESXi-48

Block-Volume161 - Block-Volume-192

32 TB

1,024 TB

OCVS-SDDC-01

OCVS-SDDC-01-Cluster-07

ESXi-49 - ESXi-56

Block-Volume162 - Block-Volume-224

32 TB

1,024 TB

OCVS-SDDC-01

OCVS-SDDC-01-Cluster-08

ESXi-57 - ESXi-64

Block-Volume225 - Block-Volume-256

32 TB

1,024 TB

Use case for OCI block volumes with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

A basic use case for integrating OCI block volumes with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution includes applications with heavy storage demands from data growth and CPU and memory resources not scaling linearly with that storage demand. The Oracle Cloud VMware Solution cluster with vSAN as the standard storage can’t satisfy the storage demand of the applications running on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution because of the heavy demand for storage growth.

A graphic depicting an example use case for this solution.

The Oracle Cloud VMware Solution cluster with vSAN as the standard storage can’t satisfy the storage demand of the applications running on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution because of the heavy demand for storage growth. To accommodate the growing storage demand, we attach OCI block volumes to satisfy to growing storage demand.

A graphic depicting the resulting deployment of the use case.

As a result, we can scale the storage independently without the need to deploy more Oracle Cloud VMware Solution bare metal hosts. This method brings the advantage that no CPU and memory resources are wasted, and no extra guest operating system licenses are required, which decreased the overall cost of the environment.

Want to know more?

For more information on the concepts in this blog post and solutions from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, see the following resources:

Thomas Thyen

Cloud VMware Solutions Specialist

Thomas Thyen is a Cloud VMware Solutions Specialist within the Technical Cloud Engineering Organization at Oracle mainly working on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution and integration with the VMware product stack and 3rd party products. He is specialised in technologies like VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN, VMware NSX, VMware HCX, VMware vSphere Replication, VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware vRealize Suite, VEEAM Backup & Replication and Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops.

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Daniel Jamil

Cloud VMware Solutions Specialist

Daniel Jamil is an OCI architect and Cloud VMware Solutions specialist in the Technical Cloud Engineering Organization at Oracle, where he mainly works on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution and integration with the VMware product stack and native Oracle Cloud services.

Daniel focuses on designing VMware disaster recovery solutions and migrations from on-premises VMware to Cloud SDDC. Daniel is specialised in technologies and solutions such as VMware vSphere, VMware HCX, NSX-T, vSAN, Veeam, VMware Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication.

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