Oracle Cloud VMware Solution - Why its Sooo Good !
20th April 2023
Every hyper scalar has at least one VMware Implementation. Azure has AVS Azure VMware Solution, GCP has GCVE The Google Cloud VMware Engine and AWS has VMware Cloud on AWS. Oracle has the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution and superficially these all might seem very similar. But that's where the layman's eye is deceiving.
So how is the Oracle Cloud solution different and why does it matter ?
I think there are two major ways in which the Oracle solution differentiates itself. Firstly the Oracle cloud VMware solution is deployed direectly in that same Oracle Cloud Data Centres i.e Availability Domains as their Bare metal Machines and Virtual Compute.
So if you can visualise a Data Centre with a long rack of servers in one rack in Oracle Cloud you could potentially have a bare metal machine, an ESX hypervisor on bare metal and a KVM hypervisor running Oracle Compute VMs sitting in the same rack and connected to the same switch. VMware is truly a native solution and not a second class citizen. There is no complex routing or interconnect ports that need to be setup.
I'm lucky to work in a large IT organisation that has individual practices devotes to various hyper scalars. The advantage of this is we get to discuss and collaborate with experts from different technologies and we get to see and contrast similar solutions. In one of the discussions I had with our Azure experts I got some insight into how the Azure VMware solution or AVS works and the impression I got was that the Azure VMware hypervisors do not sit in the same Data Centre, you need to configure Azure Expressroute between Azure workloads and Azure VMware solution using the Azure Route Server
I have seen similar considerations with GCVE in that routing defined for Google compute engine has to be redefined for GCVE. If you have a GCP solution having compute engine, Google bare metal and GCVE you have to set up routing among all the components individually because they are distributed and in some cases co-located but they are not natively adjacent. GCP calls this Private Services Access.
So the first and major point is that the OCVE solution is a first class citizen and it sits in the same racks as everything else. There is no specialised hardware , locations, or Oracle cloud management team in play here.
The second point which is even more important is that Oracle gives control of the whole VMware solution infrastructure to the customer. I think this more than anything shows that Oracle gets it where enterprise customers come in. Enterprise customers want control of their own systems and they have the skills to do so. When customers are running critical workloads with hundreds of cores in Oracle cloud they want to be the administrators of their own VSphere installation and not just consumers of a managed service. Often there are complexities in both security and configuration that are difficult to easily translate into a managed service where the Cloud provider now calls many of the shots.
This is something where Oracle excels. The Customer has a choice if they want to be in the driving seat and in most cases the customers do want that level of control when it comes to the Enterprise. If you look at Oracle database as a service also you see the same philosophy of freedom in the Base DB and ExaCS offerings while Autonomous DB offers a more managed service option.
This is an Important distinction that more and more customers will come to appreciate as they look into the details of what on the service might have been an apples to apples comparison.
With OCVS the end customer gets a natively supported service and full super user control something that none of the other solutions have, and that 's why I say that OCVS is Soooo Good!