Organizations now seek flexible and scalable solutions to optimize their IT infrastructure. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) emerges as a powerful offering, bridging the gap between on-premises VMware environments and the cloud. This blog post explores the capabilities and benefits of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, empowering businesses to embrace the potential of hybrid cloud architecture. The new Spring ’23 release of OCVS has now been released with lots of new features and enhancements that you can check out the highlights later in this post.
Seamless Integration of VMware Environments:
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution allows organizations to seamlessly integrate their existing VMware environments with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). With OCVS, businesses can deploy and manage VMware workloads in the cloud without the need for major infrastructure changes. This enables a smooth transition to the cloud while maintaining compatibility with existing VMware tools, processes, and policies.
Enhanced Scalability and Flexibility:
OCVS provides businesses with the scalability and flexibility needed to meet dynamic workload demands. Organizations can easily scale their VMware environments in Oracle Cloud to accommodate fluctuating resource requirements. With the elasticity of the cloud, businesses can quickly provision additional compute and storage resources, ensuring optimal performance and agility.
High Performance and Availability:
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution offers high-performance infrastructure to support critical workloads. Leveraging Oracle’s robust cloud infrastructure, OCVS provides low-latency connectivity and high-speed networking between VMware environments and OCI. This ensures that businesses can maintain the performance and availability levels necessary for their mission-critical applications.
Seamless Data Management and Migration:
Data management and migration are simplified with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Businesses can leverage VMware vSphere vMotion to seamlessly migrate virtual machines (VMs) from on-premises environments to OCVS without disruption. Furthermore, OCVS integrates with Oracle Cloud services, enabling organizations to leverage native cloud services such as Oracle Autonomous Database, object storage, and identity and access management (IAM) for enhanced data management capabilities.
Enhanced Security and Compliance:
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution prioritizes security and compliance. By combining the security features of VMware with the robust security controls provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OCVS ensures that sensitive data and workloads are protected in the cloud. Additionally, organizations can leverage Oracle’s comprehensive compliance certifications to meet industry-specific and regulatory requirements, such as GDPR or HIPAA.
Simplified Management and Operations:
OCVS simplifies management and operations through integration with familiar VMware tools and interfaces. Administrators can continue using VMware vCenter Server to manage and monitor their VMware environments in Oracle Cloud. This familiar environment minimizes the learning curve for IT teams and allows for consistent management practices across on-premises and cloud environments.
Cost Optimization:
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution enables cost optimization by offering flexible pricing models and reducing infrastructure costs. Organizations can leverage Oracle Cloud’s pay-as-you-go model, allowing them to scale resources as needed and avoid upfront capital expenditures. Furthermore, OCVS eliminates the need for over-provisioning on-premises hardware, optimizing resource utilization and reducing operational costs.
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) empowers organizations to unlock the potential of hybrid cloud architecture by seamlessly integrating VMware environments with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. With enhanced scalability, performance, security, and simplified management, OCVS offers a powerful platform for businesses to optimize their IT infrastructure and embrace the benefits of the cloud. By leveraging OCVS, organizations can achieve the flexibility, agility, and cost savings required to thrive in the digital age while maintaining compatibility with their existing VMware investments.
Spring ’23 release features
The Spring ’23 Release has been introduced with Enhanced Capabilities and Expanded Reach of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution
The Spring ’23 release brings a host of exciting features and advancements to empower organizations in their cloud journey. This release focuses on providing flexible Standard shapes, expanded global regions, GPU compute capabilities, and certifications for VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure and VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer.
Below are some of the key new features:
Flexible Standard Shapes:
OCVS now supports flexible Standard shapes with independent scaling of compute and storage. Powered by 3rd Gen Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors, the new Standard shapes (X7, X9, and E4) offer a wide range of core configurations, from extra-small to extra-large, allowing you to right-size your VMware workloads. Additionally, CPU expansion packs are available in 50%, 75%, and 100% of the available CPU capacity, enabling you to balance cost and performance requirements effectively.
- BM.Standard3: X9-based Standard shape with 16-, 32-, 48-, and 64-core configurations, 1-TB RAM, and 100-Gbps network bandwidth.
- BM.Standard2.52: X7-based Standard shape with 12-, 26-, 38-, and 52-core configurations, 768-GB RAM, and 50-Gbps network bandwidth.
- BM.StandardE4: E4-based Standard compute with 32-, 64-, 96-, and 128-core configurations, 2-TB RAM, and 100-Gbps network bandwidth.
GPU Compute Beta:
We are introducing the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution GPU compute beta program. The BM.GPU.GU1.4 compute shape is powered by four NVIDIA A10 Tensor Core GPUs. With this GPU-enabled compute shape, you can leverage graphics acceleration for VMware Horizon, Microsoft RDS, or Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. The BM.GPU.GU1.4 shape runs on an Intel 3rd Gen Xeon Platinum 8358 BareMetal host, providing 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. Hurry and sign up for the limited-time beta program.
VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure Certification:
Oracle and VMware have collaborated to help cloud service providers (CSPs) modernize their networks. With VMware Telco Cloud Infrastructure certification, CSPs can seamlessly incorporate Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and OCI Dedicated Region into their 5G network function architecture. By integrating with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, the VMware Telco Cloud Platform – Public Cloud offers CSPs greater flexibility in designing and implementing end-to-end networks with a rich ecosystem of VMware-verified network functions.
VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Enterprise Edition) Certification:
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution now supports VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer (Enterprise Edition). This certification enables the deployment of application delivery services, including local load balancing, global server load balancing (GSLB), and web application firewall (WAF), for workloads in OCVS. With this support, organizations can enhance their application performance, availability, and security within their VMware environments.
Expanded Global Regions:
We are committed to providing a global footprint for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and with the Spring ’23 release, we have expanded our reach even further. OCVS is now available in 42 cloud regions across 22 countries, with dual regions available in 10 countries and 12 Azure Interconnect regions. Our globally available cloud regions cater to commercial businesses, the US and UK government, and the US Department of Defense. These regions ensure proximity, compliance with data sovereignty requirements, and offer true disaster recovery with geographically distributed cloud regions in every country. The most recent additions to our commercial regions include Serbia, Chicago, Mexico (Querétaro), Spain (Madrid), and a second region in France (Paris).
Scale compute and storage independently with standard shapes (X7, X9, and E4)
The new Oracle Cloud VMware Solution standard shape configurations offer highly available OCI Block Storage for vSphere management datastores. Each software-defined data center (SDDC) requires one management datastore with VMFS 8-TB block storage starting at 10 volume performance units (VPUs) and 25K IOPS per volume. These standard shapes utilize OCI Block Volume service, allowing attachment to ESXi hosts as iSCSI Datastores. The volumes can be seamlessly disconnected from one host and attached to another in a different SDDC without data loss. Block volumes can range from 50 GB to 32 TB in size, with a maximum of 32 volumes, enabling scaling to 1 petabyte of storage in a cluster for storage-intensive workloads.
OCI VPUs provide precise control over volume performance, allocating more resources to a volume to increase IOPS, GB, and throughput per GB. This flexibility allows for scaling performance up or down, resulting in significant cost savings for workloads that do not require increased performance. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution supports up to 50 VPUs per block volume, providing vSphere-based customers with enhanced flexibility, industry-leading price-performance, lower costs, native disaster recovery capabilities, and options for external storage.
OCI block volumes are designed to deliver highly available and durable storage for mission-critical workloads. Redundant data copies are stored across multiple storage servers with built-in repair mechanisms, ensuring data integrity. The Block Volume service is designed to provide 99.99% annual durability for block and boot volumes. Regular backups are recommended as a best practice to safeguard against the failure of an availability domain and ensure comprehensive data protection.
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