About Migrating VMware Workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Running databases and application servers on VMware is a popular on-premises architecture. Your business is now looking for a data center exit strategy to move your databases and applications to the cloud. Running databases and applications in the cloud offers many benefits such as downsizing data centers, eliminating infrastructure management, accelerating application deployments, simplifying administration with automated and autonomous services, and lowering costs.
Architecture
This architecture shows a migration from on-premises VMware databases and applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
On-premises databases and applications running on VMware are migrated to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution using VMware tools such as HCX and vMotion. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution gives you a fully automated implementation of a VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) within your OCI tenancy, running on OCI bare metal instances.
After the databases are migrated to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, you can migrate to one of the following high-performance database platforms in OCI:
- Oracle Base Database Service
- Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure
- Oracle Autonomous Database Serverless
- Oracle Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure
Using Oracle Zero Downtime Migration, automate your database migration while experiencing minimal downtime.
The following diagram illustrates this reference architecture.
migrate-vmware-exadata-base-autonomous.zip
This architecture supports the following components:
- Region
An Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region is a localized geographic area that contains one or more data centers, called availability domains. Regions are independent of other regions, and vast distances can separate them (across countries or even continents).
- Virtual cloud network (VCN) and subnet
A VCN is a customizable, software-defined network that you set up in an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region. Like traditional data center networks, VCNs give you complete control over your network environment. A VCN can have multiple non-overlapping CIDR blocks that you can change after you create the VCN. You can segment a VCN into subnets, which can be scoped to a region or to an availability domain. Each subnet consists of a contiguous range of addresses that don't overlap with the other subnets in the VCN. You can change the size of a subnet after creation. A subnet can be public or private.
- Oracle Base Database Service
Oracle Base Database Service enables you to maintain absolute control over your data while leveraging the combined capabilities of Oracle Database and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). OCI offers single-node database systems and multi-node RAC database systems on virtual machines.
- Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated
Infrastructure
Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure provides Oracle Exadata Database Machine as a service in an OCI data center. The Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure service can host many Oracle databases that run in one or more VM clusters that run on a single Exadata rack in an OCI region. Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure is an ideal platform for database consolidation.
- Oracle Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure
Oracle Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure provides access to the latest autonomous database technology running on a dedicated Exadata Infrastructure in an OCI region. With Autonomous Database you have a fully elastic database where Oracle autonomously operates all aspects of the database lifecycle from database placement to backup and updates. A dedicated Exadata Infrastructure can host many autonomous VM clusters, which can host many autonomous databases.
- Oracle Autonomous Database Serverless
Oracle Autonomous Database Serverless provides access to the latest autonomous database technology. With Autonomous Database you have a fully elastic database where Oracle autonomously operates all aspects of the database lifecycle from database placement to backup and updates.
- Oracle Cloud VMware Solution Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC)
Oracle and VMware have partnered to develop a VMware certified software-defined data center (SDDC) implementation for use within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This implementation, called the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, uses OCI to host a highly available VMware SDDC. It also allows seamless migration of all your on-premises VMware SDDC workloads to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution contains the following VMware components:
- VMware vSphere ESXi
- VMware vSAN
- VMware vCenter
- VMware NSX-T
- VMware HCX (optional)
- Bare metal
An Oracle Cloud VMware Solution software-defined data center (SDDC) contains bare metal servers hosting Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. The bare metal server supports applications that require high core counts, large amounts of memory, and high bandwidth (such as Oracle Cloud VMware Solution). You can deploy Oracle Cloud VMware Solution on bare metal servers, and configure virtual machines with significant performance improvements compared to other public clouds and on-premises data centers.
- Service gateway
The service gateway provides access from a VCN to other services, such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage. The traffic from the VCN to the Oracle service travels over the Oracle network fabric and never traverses the internet.
- Dynamic routing gateway (DRG)
The DRG is a virtual router that provides a path for private network traffic between VCNs in the same region, between a VCN and a network outside the region, such as a VCN in another Oracle Cloud Infrastructure region, an on-premises network, or a network in another cloud provider.
- FastConnect
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect provides an easy way to create a dedicated, private connection between your data center and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. FastConnect provides higher-bandwidth options and a more reliable networking experience when compared with internet-based connections.
- File storage
OCI File Storage is used during migration to import the migrated database from a shared file system.
- Object storage
OCI Object Storage is used during migration for temporary storage.