The Oracle Cloud Migrations (OCM) team is pleased to announce support for virtual machine (VM) migrations to Oracle Virtualization. This new general availability feature allows customers to migrate their on-premises VMs from VMware to Oracle Virtualization with live migration capabilities and incremental replication support post-cutover. OCM users can execute on-premises to on-premises VM replications without storing data in the cloud, allowing them to adhere to their data residency requirements.
A Quick Refresher: What is Oracle Cloud Migrations?
The Oracle Cloud Migrations service provides an end-to-end, comprehensive self-service experience for migrating VMware virtual machines and Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 instances to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) compute. You can use Oracle Cloud Migrations to identify the workloads of virtual machines hosted in an environment external to OCI, plan migrations, and automate migration workflows. The Oracle Cloud Migrations service enables you to perform the following tasks:
- Automatically discover virtual machines and instances in the source environment
- Organize virtual machines and instances for migration
- Replicate virtual machine and instance data to OCI
- Plan and launch compute instances using replicated data
This Oracle Cloud Migrations service was first launched in 2022 and has been used by many customers to migrate their workloads into OCI.
A Quick Refresher: What is Oracle Virtualization?
Oracle Virtualization is a robust and reliable on-premises server virtualization solution for IT operations teams. The solution combines the open source-based management platform Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager with the high performing, secure Oracle Linux KVM hypervisor. Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager provides a centralized management platform for virtual machines, hosts, storage, and networking. It is designed for enterprises that want:
- High performance through KVM-based virtualization
- Open source flexibility with enterprise support
- Seamless integration with Oracle Linux and ecosystem tools
- A web-based management interface for simplified operations
From small deployments to large-scale data centers, Oracle Virtualization offers a consistent and reliable virtualization layer.
Enterprises are looking to migrate to new server virtualization platforms
In the rapidly evolving world of server virtualization, businesses need high performing and reliable on-premises solutions that adapt to their unique environments. With the Broadcom acquisition of VMware, many enterprises and partners are now challenged with reevaluating their options for server virtualization. Rising costs, required licensing changes, and SKU consolidations have created uncertainty at a time when IT leaders need flexibility, predictability, and scalability. Many enterprises would like to move to new on-premises sever virtualization platforms but require enterprise-grade solutions to migrate their VMs from VMware with limited downtimes.
Migrate your VMware VMs to Oracle Virtualization with Oracle Cloud Migrations
With this update to the Oracle Cloud Migrations service, customers now have the added option to migrate their VMs from VMware to Oracle Virtualization. This feature marks a significant milestone as Oracle Cloud Migrations expands beyond cloud migrations to support on-premises migrations, helping customers modernize their virtualization environments while staying within the Oracle ecosystem. Until now, Oracle Cloud Migrations has enabled customers to migrate VMs from VMware to OCI and cloud (VMware and AWS) to OCI. With this latest update to the service, customers can now migrate VMware workloads into on-premises Oracle Virtualization environments.
The Oracle Cloud Migrations service has been enhanced to:
- Discover virtual machines running on VMware and their associated metadata
- Discover Oracle Virtualization resources (storage domains, clusters, VNIC profiles, templates)
- Execute on-premises to on-premises VM replications without storing data in the cloud. VM disks are directly replicated adhering to customer’s data residency requirements
- Provision VMs in the customer’s target Oracle Virtualization environment with limited application downtime
Figure 1: Discover VMware VMs and Oracle Virtualization resources
Figure 2: VM replication to Oracle Virtualization
Getting Started
Oracle Cloud Migrations is a free service for customers with a standard OCI tenancy. The service can be accessed using the console (a browser-based interface), OCI command line interface (CLI), or the OCM REST API. Using the console, the Oracle Cloud Migrations service can be found under Migration & Disaster Recovery. In addition, the OCI software development kits (SDKs) can be used to build and deploy applications that integrate with Oracle Cloud Migrations. Additional information to get started with the service can be found in the Getting Started guide in the Oracle Cloud Migrations documentation library.
Final Thoughts
Oracle Virtualization support in Oracle Cloud Migrations is more than just a feature update—it’s a strategic enhancement. Migrating from VMware doesn’t have to mean starting over. Oracle provides a practical and efficient path forward, allowing enterprises to bring their existing VM workloads into a modern environment with confidence. Whether you’re targeting Oracle Virtualization or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the journey can be simpler than you think—and far more impactful than you expect.