Oracle Cloud VMware Solution’s killer advantage

Only Oracle Cloud VMware Solution provides you with exactly the same experience as running VMware on-premises. And when they say “the same”, they really mean literally the same – so much so that if customers have on-premises VMware and Oracle Cloud VMware, they can manage it through the same VMware vCenter interface – VMware sees it as the same thing.

This also makes lifting-and-shifting VMware workloads from on-premises to cloud easy because the cloud environment is exactly the same. There’s no refactoring of applications or reconfiguration of the environment necessary to get the workload into the cloud.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – on which Oracle VMware Cloud Solution is built – has layer 2 networking support built in throughout, which is what VMware requires to run natively.

Once customers have deployed into Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, it literally is VMware running on a cluster of three powerful bare metal servers that scale up to 64 – the maximum currently supported by VMware.

Oracle’s hardware advantage

The servers Oracle is using for its VMware Cloud Solution run not only extreme specifications (52 cores, 768GB RAM and 51TB of NVMe SSD storage), they also have special Oracle-designed silicon.

Cloud VMware Solution uses Isolated Network Virtualization, which is part of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the first public cloud to offer this.

What this means is Oracle has taken network and IO virtualization out of the hypervisor and encapsulated it in proprietary silicon, allowing customers to provision bare metal servers yet participate in a fully software-defined layer 3 network topology.

Link into Oracle Cloud services at wire speed

Running your VMware machines on Oracle Cloud means they’ll be running on the same network fabric as Oracle’s other high-performance services like Autonomous Database.

Apart from the low-latency access to services, this also has major benefits for VMware migration from on-premises to Cloud.

For example, if customer had a mission critical workload, running their application on VMware and their database in a two or four node Real Application Cluster in their data center, they ordinarily wouldn’t be able to easily move that to VMware in the cloud. Put simply, managed VMware providers wouldn’t be able to accommodate the database.

However, with Oracle VMware Cloud Solution, it’s a lift-and-shift without any re-architecting required, because the database could run on Oracle Autonomous Database, Exadata Cloud Service or Data Management Cloud Service, with a low-latency link to the application running inside Oracle VMware Cloud Solution.

One-stop support, one bill

One of the frustrating aspects of using different providers for various aspects of your software and cloud infrastructure is dealing with various different support organizations.

It’s not a problem with Oracle Cloud VMWare Solution – Oracle itself provides tier 1 and 2 support for both VMWare and Oracle services provided within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Additionally, Oracle offers consolidated billing with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – the VMware Cloud Solution is simply a line item in the consolidated invoice, which makes procurement easier.

Cloud flexibility with on-prem proximity

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution has another trick up its sleeve – and that’s the fact that it can run in one of Oracle’s Cloud@Customer Dedicated Regions – Oracle’s new ability to deploy its public cloud into a customer’s data center.

What this means is customers can have all the benefits of running their VMware machines in fully Oracle-managed infrastructure, with the same SLAs and flexible billing options, but have the machines physically located in their own data center.

This provides extremely low latency to the virtual machines for maximum application performance and may also avoid the virtual machine traffic having to go out onto more expensive WAN links.

However, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution also runs in all 20 of Oracle’s global regions, also giving companies with global footprint the ability to situate virtual machines close to their users for high performance and optimal data sovereignty compliance.

Additionally, deployment time for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is super short – it’s a “Day 0” from request service, with deployment in less than four hours. This is because it is already included in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (including Dedicated Regions in customer data centers) by default.

Customer retains full control

Most enterprise IT teams don’t want to have to upgrade software versions to someone else’s schedule – they want to be able to thoroughly test for compatibility with existing applications and configurations first.

With many managed VMware cloud environments, customers have to run the version of VMware chosen by the cloud provider.

However, with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, customers retain complete root-level control of the environment, and Oracle has no access or ability to make changes at all after the provisioning is done.

This means that customers who are running a particular version of VMware ESXi on premises can match that to the version running in Oracle Cloud – there are no forced upgrades. Customers can control what version of vSphere they deploy and can even have multiple versions of VMware within their environment.

Additionally, it’s a zero trust environment, which assures customers that Oracle removes itself from their environments once the solution is deployed in their tenancy.

Telco giant moves to VMware Cloud Solution

Chile-based Entel experienced rapid growth after acquiring NexTel Perú. As an operator of next-generation telco network infrastructure, it needed to make its business leaner to remain agile.

Its expensive and obsolete legacy systems took more than 100 people to operate and maintain, according to Helder Branco, head of IT operations at Entel.

After moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Entel now has hundreds of applications monitored and administered by one consolidated team for Chile and Perú.

Now, it is migrating its critical billing and inventory applications to Oracle’s VMware Cloud Solution.

Rather than taking years to re-architect multiple applications and technology platforms to get them to run natively in the cloud, Entel is able to migrate most of its VMware environments to the cloud in a matter of weeks, retaining total control over updates, patches, and new deployments.

Learn more about Entel’s deployment of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

Learn more about Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.