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Oracle Cloud VMware Solution
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Agenda
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what is OCVS? It is essentially running VMware inside the cloud on Bare metal servers
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Just like any presentation on cloud solutions, the journey starts with an On-prem environment. In this case, a VMware infrastructure environment that include vSphere , vSAN , NSX etc.Some of the benefits of OCVS is: It seamlessly extends your existing on-premises Vmware environment to the cloud, providing a familiar and consistent experience.You can manage OCVS just like you manage your on-premises Vmware environment, ensuring consistent operations.
[CLICK] So what we have here on the right hand side is a representation of OCVS. It is exciting and amazing at the same time to see that OCVS is made up of the same components as of On-prem but it's powered by enterprise-ready OCI. OCVS offers high scalability, allowing you to start with 3-node clusters and scale up to 64 nodes for production environments. You can also choose single-node clusters for testing and short-term development. Use cases for single host SDDC includes: faster onboarding for proof of concept. Disaster recovery evaluation with SRM etc.
In terms of the compute nodes that you can use for your cluster nodes is anywhere from 12 cores to 128 cores per bare metal host
You can utilize existing nvme storage on cluster nodes or you can use OCI block storage service to increase capacity.
For flexibility and scalability perspective, we can scale using additional cluster nodes But if its based-on storage capacity we can independently scale the storage for example without having to add more cluster nodes, we can just use file storage or block storage from OCI
All the software component are included as part of deployment so when SDDC is deployed you get vSphere you get HCX you get NSX you get vSAN all those components are included as part of theDeployment and you manage them exactly the same way that you manage your on-prem environment.
One of the benefit of OCVS and OCI is that because its on bare metal, its running the same Vmware software and you get the root password once SDDC is deployed in the environment. You manage it, you upgrade it you patch it exactly the same You do in your on-prem environment. It also comes with HCX which you can used to start moving the workloads and migrating workloads using the HCX connector on two sites , your on-prem to OCVS. There are two license editions for HCX, Advanced and Enterprise. We will explore more on it in our later slides.
Other benefits includes Fast Provisioning that is Adding new cluster nodes to your OCVS environment takes only 30 minutes compared to long procurement time in standard on-prem datacenter setup
OCI follows zero trust model so when you deploy the environment, by default you have access to nothing, no one can get in, no one can get out. So you need to start opening up the services. Access the service from networking perspective, means Opening up required routing rules and firewall rules. then you can start accessing its resources inside OCI.
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So, you typically connect to OCVS on OCI using a fast connect. It give you that private dedicated link so that you have that seamless access between your on-prem and OCI. Its high bandwidth low-latency connections upto multiple 100 gigabit links per second for a fast connect but you can also use things like VPN for connection
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Oracle Cloud VMware Solution offers both Intel and AMD processor-based Compute Shapes. The service has two types of compute shapes, Dense I/O and Standard compute shapes. Dense I/O shapes include locally-attached NVMe-based SSDs, which are used to create a VMware vSAN storage solution for the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC). Whereas with Standard shapes users attach OCI Block Storage as the Primary Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) based Datastore. Standard Shapes allows users to configure the cores per instance as required with disaggregated Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) block and file storage.
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution also has GPU Shapes designed for Designed for hardware-accelerated workloads. GPU shapes include Intel or AMD CPUs and NVIDIA graphics processors
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So you see, Traditionally, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution environments were limited to a single cluster within a single SDDC, which could be a bottleneck when it came to resource allocation and management.
With Oracle Cloud VMware Solution being a customer-controlled environment, the customers were creating clusters manually with all the flexibility that the solution provides. To make this process easier for customers, Oracle allowed customers to add up to six clusters within a single SDDC from the Oracle Cloud Console.
Let’s understand how a customer could use multiple clusters to scale their VMware environment on OCVS.
The customer first creates a unified management cluster for their workloads and hosts their management components using dense hosts. They migrate all their on-premises application VMs into this cluster. As these applications are storage-intensive workloads, they scale out their storage using OCI Block Storage as secondary storage.
The customer then creates a dedicated cluster for their database workloads, using standard hosts to get the best possible performance while utilizing the benefits of OCI Block Storage as their primary storage.
The customer creates a third cluster for their production workloads, using a mix of dense and standard hosts to meet their performance and budget requirements. We will talk about mixed shaped cluster in our next slide
Finally, our customer adds GPU hosts in a dedicated cluster for their specialized workloads to meet their business requirements.
Each cluster is managed using a single vCenter Server instance, giving the customer a single point of control for all their VMware workloads. This example is just one of many of how multicluster SDDC can help create a customized VMware environment in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
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Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) continues to evolve, providing greater flexibility and resource optimization for VMware deployments. One of the latest features introduced is mixed-shape clusters, which allow you to combine different compute shapes within the same processor family.
VMware generally recommends utilizing homogeneous clusters composed of identical Compute shapes with matching OCPU configurations and originating from the same CPU family to maximize performance consistency and predictability. While mixed-shape clusters offer enhanced flexibility, careful planning and consideration are crucial to ensure optimal performance and compatibility.
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OCI, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure utilizes a unique technology called off-box network virtualization. In simpler terms, it separates the network and I/O virtualization tasks from the traditional software stack running on the server and places them directly within the network hardware. This approach offers several advantages:
•Increased Performance: By offloading network virtualization from the hypervisor (software that manages virtual machines), OCI eliminates the performance overhead associated with traditional virtualization, leading to faster network speeds and responsiveness.
•Enhanced Security: Separating network functions creates a security boundary. Even if a virtual machine's hypervisor is compromised, the attack would be isolated to that specific virtual network and wouldn't spread to others. This strengthens overall security.
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OCI reduces threat proliferation between hosts by implementing network virtualization outside the hypervisor. Even if a bad actor escapes a VM and compromises the hypervisor, they will not be able to reconfigure the network virtualization, limiting lateral movement to other hosts.
OCI’s physical network architecture adds a layer of defense to the network virtualization by further isolating customer tenancies and limiting the risk of lateral threat proliferation. The physical network components are the racks, routers, and switches that form the physical layer of OCI.
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Customers want full control over their VMware estate, they need to be able to manage software versions and updates at their pace. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is based on a bare metal architecture that includes vSphere, vCenter, NSX, vSAN and HCX. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution provides super-user, full root access and a VMware Admin console for IT administrators to fully manage their VMware environments in the cloud.
Security is always a top priority. Every customer instance of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is completely isolated and the customer is provisioned their own hardware instance that is not visible from Oracle or other customers. This is truly a unique capability. In fact, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution has the highest United States government security level for operating cloud infrastructure. It is FedRAMP+ authorized that enables the US intelligence community, other civilian and department of defense agencies to deploy Oracle Cloud VMware Solution in FedRAMP Authorized environments. Additionally, customers can bring their existing, hardened VMware security policies into the cloud without any changes.
Predictability can mean several things -time to productivity after migrating from on-premises to the cloud, operating costs, application performance, and user experience are all important predictability factors. IT teams can rely on a predictable operating environment with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution with equal to, or sometimes better, operating performance in the cloud over on-premises environments.
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This is very similar to “VMware Cloud” use cases, and will be common amongst all cloud providers that leverage the VMware software-defined data center stack.
Let’s take a brief look at each these:
Cloud Migrations:
This could range from migrating a few key applications to an entire data center evacuation or anything in between.
Compelling events for cloud migrations might include: An Infrastructure Refresh cycle, data center consolidation efforts due to Mergers and Acquisitions.
Hybrid Cloud Capacity Expansion:
This is for customer who want to expand their footprint or on-demand capacity quickly and easily.
This could be for use cases like:
•Test/Development (where you can spin up/spin down lots of VM’s)
•Global Expansion without the expense of building new data centers in those regions
•Data Gravity, getting data close to Oracle native services
•Or being able to burst on-demand to accommodate peak usage
Disaster Recovery:
This could be a customer implementing a New DR strategy or complementing or replacing an existing DR strategy
A proper disaster recovery solution is the key to disaster avoidance and facilitating business continuity
Application Modernization and Workload Management with come into play for applications customers are looking to modernize. Housing existing applications in the cloud to help facilitate the develop of their next generation applications.
Government Cloud:
Oracle Cloud is the first public cloud built from the ground up to be a better cloud for every application. By rethinking core engineering and systems design for cloud computing, it use innovations that solve problems that customers have with existing public clouds. There are a few reasons for government customers that they choose Oracle GovCloud such as easier to migrate critical enterprise workloads, OCI has the broad cloud services and partner ecosystem you need to build production cloud native apps. Autonomous services automatically secure, tune, and scale your apps
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One of the key advantages of choosing OCI or OCVS for multinational companies is its extensive global reach. OCVS boasts an impressive presence in 50 locations worldwide, surpassing any of its competitors. This ensures that your business can seamlessly move, build, and run all workloads and cloud applications with low latency and robust data protection, regardless of your location. Additionally, OCVS offers consistent pricing across all regions, eliminating the need for geographical cost variations. With OCVS, your business can operate seamlessly anywhere in the world.
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Earlier, we saw a number of, what Oracle calls “Regions”, but what does that mean in the physical world?
Let’s take a look into one of them. [CLICK] and in this case, it’s the US-EAST Region in Ashburn, Virginia.
A region is, according to Oracle “a localized geographic area”
The physical locations within a region are called Availability Domains [CLICK] and each AD is made up of one or more data centers located within the region. These are similar to Availability Zones in some other Hyperscale Cloud services.
[CLICK] Each region will have one or more AD. Traffic between availability domains, and between regions is encrypted over high bandwidth network connections, with low-latency between AD this allows applications to be distributed across them.
For Regions which open with a single Availability Domain, Oracle aim to have a second AD in service within a year. This approach allows more rapid geographic expansion than would be possible if rollout were dependent on multiple ADs.
Within each AD are groupings of hardware and infrastructure which collectively make up a Fault Domain. [CLICK]
Each Availability Domain [CLICK] contains three Fault Domains which together provide anti-affinity locations within that AD.
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Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is a native tenant to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The solution can leverage all the benefits that OCI has to offer.
We can perform VMware-based Workload migration to OCVS without any rearchitecting or retooling. This can be achieved with VMware HCX
It’s the only customer-controlled solution from VMware Cloud portfolio
We have More compute, network and storage options with Oracle Standard and Dense bare metal compute shapes
And you Leverage your existing skills with familiar VMware tools
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50 OCI regions with uniform pricing across all the geographical locations
It run the US Government workloads with 27 compliance certifications
Gain the benefits of scale and agility provided by Oracle Cloud to run the enterprise workloads
Take the benefits of data analytics services to deliver AI/ML application workloads
Remove data silos, converge and gain new insights
Now that we have discovered capability of OCVS and OCI platform strength, let’s explore the method for moving the workload from on-prem to OCVS.
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Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) is a powerful solution that enables seamless workload mobility and application migration across different environments. It bridges the infrastructure boundaries between on-premises data centers and cloud-based environments, allowing organizations to create an application mobility platform.
VMware HCX includes the following services:
•Interconnect: This service creates and secures connections between VMware HCX installations, supporting management, migration, replication, and disaster recovery operations.
•HCX WAN Optimization: This service works with the Interconnect service to improve the network performance through a combination of deduplication, compression, and line conditioning techniques.
•HCX Network Extension: This service extends the VM networks from a VMware HCX enabled source site to a VMware HCX enabled remote site. VMs that are migrated or created on the extended segment at the remote site are layer 2 adjacent to virtual machines placed on the origin network.
•Bulk Migration: This service uses vSphere Replication protocol to move virtual machines in parallel between VMware HCX enabled sites.
•HCX vMotion Migration: This migration method uses the vSphere vMotion protocol to move a single virtual machine between VMware HCX enabled sites with no service interruption.
•Disaster Recovery: This service replicates and protects virtual machines to a remote data center.
•Mobility Groups: This service supports assembling one or more virtual machines to logical sets for migration and monitoring as a group. Group migration provides the flexibility to manage migrations by application, network, or other aspects of your environment.
•OS Assisted Migration: This migration service moves Linux based guest VMs or Windows based guest VMs from their host environment to a vSphere enabled data center. The service has two appliances. The HCX Sentinel gateway (HSW) appliance is deployed at the source site and the HCX Sentinel Data Receiver appliance at the destination site. The service also requires the installation of the HCX Sentinel software on each guest machine.
•Replication Assisted vMotion: This service uses both VMware Replication and vSphere vMotion technologies to provide large-scale parallel migrations with no service interruption.
•Traffic Engineering: VMware HCX provides settings for optimizing the network traffic for Interconnect and Network Extension services.
The Application Path Resiliency and TCP Flow Conditioning features define the HCX Traffic Engineering services:
–The Application Path Resiliency service creates multiple tunnel flows, for both Interconnect and Network Extension traffic. Those flows might follow multiple paths across the network infrastructure from the source to the destination data centers. The service then intelligently forwards traffic through the tunnel over the optimal path and dynamically switches between tunnels, depending on the traffic conditions.
–The TCP Flow Conditioning service adjusts the segment size during the TCP connection handshake between endpoints across the network extension. The service optimizes the average packet size to reduce fragmentation and lower the overall packet rate.
•Mobility Optimized Networking: This service integrates VMware HCX Network Extension with NSX Dynamic Routing to enable migrated virtual machines to reach other virtual machines and networks optimally, without a trombone or hairpin effect.