EMEA A&C CCOE Partner Technology Cloud Engineering
VMware on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Want to run some of your VMware services in the public cloud?
Well you can do this on the Oracle Cloud, without having to get it as a managed service.
For some time, VMware has provided solutions for improved efficiency and manageability that most every organization in the world deploys to run their business. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution will accelerate the pace of digital transformation for organizations around the world. For the first time, you can now build VMware virtual server environments natively on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
This is not a managed service. You get full control to build and manage your cloud VMware environment exactly as it runs in their own data center. You can extend the on-premises software defined data center into the Oracle Cloud for easy migration and consistent operations on both sides of the cloud fence.
Users of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution get low-latency connectivity between their cloud VMware environment and the full roster of Oracle Cloud services including Autonomous Database, Exadata Cloud Service, and all the data management, high-performance computing, and core services that Oracle Cloud offers.
What is Oracle Cloud VMware Solution?
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) is a solution designed, developed and deployed by Oracle. It leverages the VMware Cloud Foundation which makes deploying vSphere stack of products an easy thing. You will have vSphere, vSAN (virtual storage), NSX-T (virtual networking) deployed to Oracle Bare Metal hosts in OCI using a VMware Validated Design (VVD) architecture and on VMware certified hardware. You can of course scale up and down.
The following diagram shows how the various components of the Oracle Cloud VMWare Solution SDDC are deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure bare metal Compute instances, and how the solution is integrated into the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environment.
We have three ESXi hosts of an SDDC that resides in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure VCN. The center host shows the installed VMWare software components for compute (vSphere), network (NSX-T), and storage (vSAN) support. The NSX overlay manages the flow of traffic between the VMs, and between the VMs and the rest of the resources in the solution. The VCN here includes various gateways that allow connectivity between the SDDC and an on-premises network, the internet, and the Oracle Services Network.
About the VMWare Software
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's VMWare software bundle contains vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and vCenter components to support compute, storage, and network needs for a fully functional VMWare environment.
- vSphere: vSphere is VMWare's virtualization platform for unified management of the SDDC's CPU, storage, and networking infrastructure. Two key components of vSphere are ESXi hypervisor and vCenter Server.
- NSX-T: NSX-T Data Center provides the SDDC with its virtual networking and security capabilities. The NSX-T deployment includes NSX Manager unified appliances with NSX-T Local Manager and NSX-T Controller, and NSX-T Edge nodes.
- vSAN: Oracle Cloud VMWare Solution SDDCs use VMWare's vSAN storage technology, which provides a single shared datastore for compute and management workloads (VMs).
Solution Highlights
From a use case perspective, the unique ability is to simply extend your on-premises data centers into the cloud to enable graceful migrations of virtualized resources to Oracle’s enterprise cloud, as well as hybrid deployments that span on-premises and cloud environments with seamless management of both. We believe that no other major cloud vendor today gives customers this level of flexibility and control.
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution also gives you full access to features of a VMware SDDC, along with the following benefits:
- High availability: All VMware components are distributed across different fault domains within the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region’s availability domains. vSAN converged storage technology replicates data across all the ESXi hosts in the SDDC.
- Scalability: You can start with 3 ESXi hosts and scale up to 64 hosts in a single SDDC.
- Lift and shift: Migration of on-premises VMware workloads to a Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is seamless.
- Full integration: Because the SDDC resides in a virtual cloud network (VCN), it can be configured to communicate with other Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources such as Compute instances, DB systems and Autonomous Databases, and so on.
- Manageability: The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console provides workflows to facilitate SDDC creation and networking configuration.
- Layer 2 networking: SDDCs are configured with VLANs, which support applications that need layer 2 networking to run in the public cloud.
How do I provision OCVS?
How can I make use of Oracle cloud-native services?
Your VMware environment can connect to Oracle’s cloud-native services through the Service Gateway. This gateway enables consumer-to-service private connections (C2S).
If you want to know the Cloud services that can be accessed from the private subnets in your Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) take a look to https://www.oracle.com/cloud/networking/service-gateway.html
Setting Up an Oracle Cloud VMware Solution SDDC
Required IAM Policy
To use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you must be given the required type of access in a policy written by an administrator, whether you're using the Console or the REST API with an SDK, CLI, or another tool. If you try to perform an action and get a message that you don’t have permission or are unauthorized, confirm with your administrator the type of access you've been granted, and which compartment you should work in.
Prerequisites
- An existing VCN with an IP address CIDR size of /22 or larger available for running the SDDC.
- We recommend that you set up connectivity between the VCN and your on-premises network before provisioning your SDDC. See Access to Your On-Premises Network.
- If you do not plan to use the workflow to create an SDDC, ensure that you configure the SDDC's networking resources with the security rules detailed in Security Rules for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution SDDCs. Otherwise, provisioning the SDDC will fail.
If you do not yet have a VCN for your SDDC, you can quickly create one and set up an IPSec VPN between your on-premises network and the VCN by using the VPN Connect workflow. See VPN Connect QuickStart to learn how.
After you provisioned your SDDC, you might want to perform some of the following tasks:
- Configure network connectivity between the SDDC and resources in your on-premises network, the Oracle Services Network, the internet through a NAT gateway, or other resources in the VCN.
- Modify resources or properties of your SDDC. For example, add ESXi hosts.
- Create VMs in your SDDC or perform other VMware tasks. To do so, you can log into vCenter by using the vSphere Client link from the detail page of the SDDC.
Along with the ability to run VMware on Oracle Cloud, the partnership will include expanded technical support for Oracle products running on VMware virtualized environments. This will improve the ability to run Oracle Database and applications in VMware environments, whether in our cloud, in other clouds, or in customer data centers.
Oracle will support customers with active support contracts running supported versions of Oracle products in Oracle supported computing environments.
Please refer to the recent Press Release at https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oow19-oracle-and-vmware-091619.html