26/06/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 27/06/2024 06:57
Despite the shift toward cloud-native architectures, virtualization continues to play a crucial role in hosting applications. According to a recentIDC Info Brief study, 68% of applications are still running on virtual machines (VMs), and77.5% are running on VMware. This is because VMs are ideal for running legacy applications and databases that are difficult to containerize, ensuring isolation and maintaining expected functionality.
But how can organizations continue to innovate and achieve cloud economics with their VMware workloads? Over the past three years, Oracle and VMware, now Broadcom, have worked together to help customers swiftly migrate and transform VMware workloads with the performance, security, and elasticity of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), available in 48 regions and 24 countries. Together, we have helped hundreds of VMware customers achieve cloud success by reducing operational costs with flexible OCI compute shapes and adjacent Oracle Cloud data services and applications.
For example, The National Roads and Motorists' Association (NRMA) migrated to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) for their 2.9 million members. This migration resulted in significant savings on infrastructure management costs and improved performance in call center applications. "Oracle, including the team that helped us set up OCVS, is brilliant in terms of capability, responsiveness, and technical know-how. They are up there with some of the best cloud support we get," said Maroun Azzi, General Manager Technology, Membership and Motoring, NRMA.
Since day one, OCVS users have shared the importance of precisely aligning resources to their VMware workloads, and today we are excited to announce the OCVS Summer '24 release with an even broader array of compute industry-leading compute shapes.
A significant advantage of OCVS is its availability in a wide variety of OCI compute shapes, which come in a broad range of core configurations. Uniquely, OCVS supports multi-cluster SDDCs, allowing mixed compute shapes with varying core counts and storage options to be combined into right-sized clusters to align resources to your VMware workloads.
We're thrilled to introduce the OCI E5 Standard compute shape, powered by the 4th Gen AMD EPYC Processors, codenamed 'Genoa'-coming later this summer. These E5 compute shapes feature 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors with a base clock frequency of 2.4 GHz and a max boost of up to 3.7 GHz. They also have 2.25 TB DDR5 memory and 384 MB of L3 cache. Thanks to an upgrade from DDR4 to DDR5 and an increase from 8 to 12 memory channels, the E5 instances offer twice the memory bandwidth of the E4 generation. The new BM.Standard.E5 boasts 192 OCPUs (192 cores or 384 threads), and theE5 standard bare-metal shapes outperformed the previous E4 generations with up to 2x better absolute performance.
Continuing our focus to provide the most flexible configurations for your VMware workloads, we're making OCVS E5 Standard compute shapes available in 48-, 96-, 144-, and 192-core configurations. These new E5 shapes can be added as a new cluster to new or existing SDDCs and are well-suited to support applications that heavily rely on CPU resources, such as ML/AI and video and image processing.
Today, we are moving from tech preview to general release with the OCVS A10 compute shape, powered by fourNVIDIA A10 GPUs. The BM.GPU.A10.4 runs on 3rd-generation Intel Xeon Ice Lake processors with 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.
Coupled with NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation (vWS), software that unlocks NVIDIA RTX technology from the cloud, the BM.GPU.A10.4 provides the performance required for graphics-intensive workloads like computer-aided design (CAD), healthcare imaging, and product life-cycle management applications.
By combining NVIDIA A10 GPU features with VMware Horizon VDI and Citrix VDI solutions, you can support centralized virtual desktop management for a consistent user experience. With Citrix and VMware Horizon, you can efficiently manage virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) for remote work, enabling secure access to applications and data from anywhere, facilitating collaboration among dispersed teams, and optimizing resource allocation for intensive tasks such as 3D modeling, data analysis, and software development. To get started, check out theNVIDIA GPU-optimized virtual machine image on the OCI Marketplace and learn howNVIDIA virtual GPUs (vGPUs) are integrated into the Horizon desktop and application environments; organizations can easily support real-time collaboration with 3D applications at scale.
If you're new to running VMware workloads on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OCVS is "just VMware." Designed to mirror the experience of running VMware on premises, OCVS is comprised of OCI bare-metal compute shapes and comes with VMware Cloud Foundation licenses. OCVS includes the same VMware Cloud Foundation licenses that VMware customers use on premises, including vSphere, vCenter, NSX, vSAN, and HCX for a streamlined migration to bare-metal OCI compute. The customer-controlled environment allows IT administrators to continue to operate workloads with root access and full administrative control to patch and upgrade VMware software according to your internal change control processes.
OCVS is a first-class OCI service with uniform price stability available in all 48 commercial and government sectors, including 10 multiple availability domain regions. Customers benefit from a globally fixed pricing model, ensuring predictability and financial control. OCVS offers on-demand, 1-year, and 3-year commitment options with the widest variety of flexible dense and standard compute shapes available in configurations ranging from 16 to 192 cores and disaggregated OCI block storage to tailor your VMware workload accordingly.
Seamlessly integrated with other OCI services, OCVS not only facilitates the migration of VMware workloads but also offers access to over 100 adjacent cloud services such as Oracle applications, data services (e.g. Autonomous, Exadata, MySQL), high-performance computing (HPC), GPU, AI services, analytics, security, compute, storage, and networking. This means that users can natively deploy Oracle Exadata Cloud Service (ExaCS) on OCI in the same tenancy and then seamlessly connect to applications in the VMware SDDC for a high-performance and high-availability solution.
Last year, we introducedstandard shapes for OCVS with disaggregated storage, allowing you to scale storage independently from compute usingOCI Block Volume Service. This means you can scale your storage independently with resilient, high-performance OCI block storage for your VMware workloads without needing to deploy additional OCVS bare-metal hosts. This capability lets you create OCI block volumes as iSCSI block volumes, attach them to OCVS hosts, and use them as a VMFS datastore for hosting VMs and storing templates, ISOs, and more. A single block volume can have a maximum size of 32 TB, which allows an OCVS cluster with 32 block volumes attached to provide up to 1 PB of storage capacity for VMs.
In line with our commitment to customer control, we offered some recent innovations with OCVS including multi-cluster SDDC with standard, dense, and NVIDIA GPU shape clusters to align new compute resources to the changing demands of your workloads. These enhancements allow VMware customers to refresh and add new OCI compute shapes in an existing SDDC for a seamless hardware transition by integrating new hosts without disrupting operations while using familiar VMware tools like vMotion and Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC).
Oracle has partnered with leading enterprises across various industries, including finance and banking, retail, telecommunications, manufacturing, government, and global systems integrators, to modernize their cloud infrastructure in OCI commercial, government, and OCI Dedicated Region while continuing to operate VMware workloads with the predictability, security, and control that they have on premises. By choosing OCVS as their preferred platform for migrating and operating VMware workloads, our customers have bypassed costly rearchitecting, reskilling, or refactoring of their applications. With complete customer control, they have taken advantage of modernization and cloud agility while retaining the predictability, security, and control of VMware workloads they had on premises.
Notable enterprises such as TIM Brasil, Telefónica, and Sky Brasil have embraced OCVS, experiencing enhanced operational efficiency through a seamless transition from on-premises data centers.
If you are ready to start your own cloud journey with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, contact your Oracle sales team and check out these additional resources:
Source IDC: Accelerating Enterprise Cloud Adoption: Achieve global scale