Understand Deployment Architecture

The architecture illustrates how each component of the VMware SDDC is configured and deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute bare metal instances.

The following figure shows how Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is designed and deployed in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and its integration with other services running natively in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Description of the illustration ovcs_architecture.pngThe Oracle Cloud VMware Solution architecture comprises the following key components, discussed in detail below:

• Compute (vSphere and ESXi)
• Network (VCN and NSX-T)
• Storage (vSAN)

Understand Compute Architecture (vSphere and ESXi)

This layer of the solution provides Oracle Cloud Infrastructure bare metal DenseIO instances for running the VMware vSphere hypervisor, ESXi. VMware ESXi is an enterprise-class, Type 1 hypervisor that runs virtual machines (VMs).

ESXi deployed on bare metal instances provides a strong foundation for the SDDC. As of now, only the BM.DenseIO2.52 Compute shape is supported to run VMware SDDC on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The VMware vSphere cluster in Oracle Cloud VMware Solution provides a 3-to-64 node ESXi cluster that delivers the following configuration in a single Oracle Cloud VMware Solution cluster:

• 156–3328 OCPUs
• 2.25–48 TB memory
• 153–3264 TB raw storage

High availability of the ESXi hosts is provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Understand Networking Architecture (VCN and NSX-T)

The bare metal instances that host ESXi are deployed in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure virtual cloud network (VCN). A VCN closely resembles a traditional network, with firewall rules and specific types of communication gateways.

A VCN resides in a single Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region and covers a single, contiguous IPv4 CIDR block of your choice. They include subnets, VLANs, route tables, security lists, gateways, and network security groups. VMware NSX-T is deployed as part of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. It provides the agile software-defined networking capabilities of the solution. The following management components are deployed as part of NSX-T:

• NSX Manager and Controller
• NSX Edge

These components reside in a vSphere cluster that runs as a VM on top of the ESXi hosts. High availability of the NSX software components depends on the availability of the ESXi hosts and VMware vSphere cluster’s native high-availability and disaster-recovery functionality. High availability of NSX networking depends on the VCN. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure VCN regional subnet provides greater extension for the SDDC to scale out.

The bare metal instances used for the SDDC are backed by 2x25-Gbps network bandwidth and support 52 VNICS (26 per physical NIC), which ensures high throughput, low latency, and a fully redundant network.

Understand Storage Architecture (vSAN)

vSAN is a software-defined storage solution that provides enterprise-class performance, reliability, and availability. vSAN uses commodity servers with locally attached storage to create and maintain its storage abstraction layer (datastore). It saves and manipulates data in the form of storage objects.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution includes vSAN storage technology that provides a single shared datastore (vsanDatastore) for compute and management workloads (VMs). Each SDDC uses an “all flash” vSAN storage solution built on NVMe-backed bare metal instance storage that offers high performance, low latency, and robust block storage capability without the need of traditional SAN.

vSAN implements fault domains, which are different from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure fault domains. vSAN fault domains let vSAN group multiple hosts (typically within the same chassis or rack) into a logical boundary domain. The fault domains setting ensures that multiple replica copies of storage objects are distributed across the domains. If an entire domain (chassis or rack) fails, only one replica is affected.

vSAN storage policies are used to determine the high availability of individual VMs. You can configure different policies in Oracle Cloud VMware Solution to determine the number of host and device failures that a VM can tolerate.