Technical Overview: Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) was made generally available in August 2020, and since then, it has seen rapid growth in overall customer adoption. The OCVS plays a pivotal role in VMware’s Multi-Cloud vision.

In this blog post, I will outline the technical overview of OCVS. This blog post will help you understand the basic constructs, overall use cases, and what it offers.

What is OCVS?

OCVS provides a customer-managed, native VMware-based cloud environment hosted in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This allows you to spin up VMware SDDC in the oracle cloud with complete control of your own. The provisioning of VMware SDDC is fully automatic and eliminates the operational overhead required to deploy a new data center. 

A single SDDC consists of VMware vCenter, ESXi Host, vSAN, and NSX-T. It also comes with the VMware HCX that allows you to extend your on-premises data center to the Oracle cloud and offers seamless workload migration to the cloud.

SDDC Bundle Specifications

OCVS offers three SDDC versions that you can select from, and these are listed below

You can spin up an SDDC with a minimum of 3 hosts, and it can scale up to a maximum of 64 hosts. There are two types of Compute shapes available for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, and these are 

Key Terms

Before understanding OCVS, let us know some key terms mentioned in OCVS.

Tenancy

When you sign up for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle creates a tenancy for your company, a secure and isolated logical partition for you to create, organise, and administer your cloud services.

Compartment

A tenancy, which can also be known as the “root compartment,” can be sub-divided into additional compartments. Resources that are provisioned must be assigned to a compartment.

Regions and availability domain

When deploying an Oracle Cloud VMware Solution instance, the bare-metal host belongs to a single availability domain. The hosts are spread across fault domains in the availability domain. Regions are a geographical grouping of one or more availability domains.

Realms

Realms are a grouping of regions that are isolated from each other. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure currently offers a commercial realm and two realms for government cloud regions.

Virtual Cloud Network (VCN)

A Virtual Cloud Network defines a network in the Oracle Cloud from an IP and routing perspective. The Virtual Cloud network can span availability domains in a region but not across multiple regions.

Instance

There are Oracle physical and virtual instances. A physical instance describes a physical compute Server. Virtual machines running in the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution are virtual instances.

Shape

A shape describes how much CPU and Memory are assigned to an instance.

Here is a list of all the key terms and terminology you might encounter while working with OCI and OCVS. Key Concepts and Terminology

OCVS SDDC High-Level Architecture

By default, the OCVS provision workflow deploys all the ESXi hosts in a single availability domain in a region and is distributed across 3 fault domains.

Before you deploy an SDDC, you need to create a VCN network. The size of the VCN subnet depends on the number of ESXi hosts that are part of the SDDC.

For example, For vSphere 6. x, Oracle recommends creating a size /22 CIDR network segment in your VCN for the SDDC’s networking resources.  The SDDC CIDR will be further divided into 7 segments of size /25.

And for vSphere 7. x,  Oracle recommends creating a size /21 CIDR network segment in your VCN for the SDDC’s networking resources. The SDDC CIDR will be further divided into 10 segments of size /25.

The list of provisioned VLANs and their descriptions are as below –

OCVS Use-Case

There are plenty of compelling reasons for choosing OCVS, but here I am listing some of the use-cases for OCVS.

Migrate or Extend to Cloud

With OCVS backed by VMware HCX, you can easily migrate or extend your workloads to the Oracle cloud. Take a look at this solution playbook to learn more.

DRaaS on OCVS

OCVS provides a disaster recovery solution using VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for seamless business continuity. Take a look at this solution playbook to learn more.

Enable Digital Workspace with VMware Horizon and OCVS

With the ever-increasing remote workspace demand, you can quickly provision a digital workspace on Oracle Cloud with the help of OCVS and VMware Horizon. Check out the details here.

The above use cases are just a few among many, and shortly, I will outline some of the implementation details to help you get started with OCVS.

OCVS Pricing

Please consult with oracle about the exact pricing details, but OCVS is offered as a cloud service; hence customers have different pricing options depending upon their commitment levels.

Getting Started with OCVS 

Here are some of the resources to start with.

VMware E-Book: Getting Started with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Oracle Cloud Documentation                  

OCVS Hands-On Lab

Attributes

Steve Dockar, Global Technical Sales Manager, VMware

Jason McKenzie, Member of the Multi-Cloud Center Of Excellence, VMware

Oracle Cloud Documentation