1. Migrate your on-premises VMware workloads to the cloud
  2. Learn About Migrating VMware Workloads to the Cloud

Learn About Migrating VMware Workloads to the Cloud

Businesses that are considering a move to the cloud want to take advantage of the benefits of public cloud: elastic capacity, accelerated operational and business velocity, and clear and planned infrastructure costs. Until recently, these benefits could be applied only to “cloud native” infrastructure—virtual machine or bare metal instances, database as a service (DBaaS), and so on. Changes to these types of platforms have typically required alterations in systems and application architecture, unplanned updates to operating systems and databases, and changes to long standing operational practices—all of which adds to risk and cost.

Architecture

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution enables organizations that have a significant investment in VMware infrastructure to take advantage of the benefits of public cloud.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution gives you a fully automated implementation of a VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) within your own Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure bare metal instances, that contains the following VMware components:
  • VMware vSphere ESXi
  • VMware vSAN
  • VMware vCenter
  • VMware NSX-T
  • VMware HCX (optional)
The following image illustrates how these VMware components work within the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure environment. Description of oracle_cloud_vmware_solution_architecture.png follows
Description of the illustration oracle_cloud_vmware_solution_architecture.png

These VMware components are provided to you with full administrative access, which lets you build environments that meet the needs of your organization. Because this is a standard VMware implementation, existing operational practices work on the infrastructure that’s provided as part of the solution.

Before You Begin

Certain procedures in this article are beyond the scope of this playbook. To assure completion of this solution, you should first review these additional documents:

Understand Live Migration of On-Premises VMware Workloads

Learn about how you can perform online, or live, migration of VMware workloads from an on-premises data center environment to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution provides a secure, reliable, and elastic solution for your VMware workloads running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

This solution boradly categorizes migration into the following three major scenarios, and explains how to use the tools available for live migration. This solution also covers the necessary implementation steps and guidance to achieve your migration goals.
  • Application migration from an on-premises VMware environment to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution by using VMware HCX

    VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX) is used to perform migration (vMotion) or bulk migration of mission-critical application workloads from an on-premises VMware SDDC to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

  • Non-Oracle Database migration from an on-premises VMware environment to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution by using VMware HCX

    VMware HCX is used to perform migration (vMotion) or bulk migration of mission-critical application workloads from an on-premises VMware SDDC to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

  • Oracle Database migration from on-premises to Oracle Cloud Database services

    An important area of consideration is migrating mission-critical production database workloads from on-premises to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. This article outlines different database migration scenarios, such as moving Oracle Databases that are running on virtual machines (VM) in an on-premises VMware SDDC to run natively on Oracle Cloud Database services. It also covers the necessary guidelines for using available tools such as Oracle Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM), which is compliant with the Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) solution, to perform live migration of Oracle Databases to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Solution Overview

There are many ways to migrate your on-premises VMware workloads to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, including using online or offline migration. This solution outlines the process of online, or live, migration of your on-premises VMware workloads to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

Migrating workloads to a public cloud is challenging because of the incompatibilities between on-premises and cloud infrastructure environments. This paper helps to reduce the complexity of such operations.

Some of the bigger challenges for cloud adoption are as follows:
  • Incompatible, non-interoperable stacks in application dependency mapping and migration planning, which accounts for complex application infrastructure architectures
  • Cross-site networking and security issues, which can impede adoption of a cloud platform
  • Application dependency mapping delay—for example, applications depend on systems that are not readily available for other cloud providers
  • Business disruptions that require maintaining a secure, off-premises “active” infrastructure, resulting in potential capacity or resource loss

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution overcomes these challenges by building an abstraction layer on top of existing site-specific implementations of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using VMware HCX. HCX is an application mobility platform that simplifies application migration, workload rebalancing, and business continuity across data centers and clouds.

The process described here focuses on key benefits of HCX, such as migration, network extension, and cross-cloud connectivity, for live migration of production workloads, without disruption to the business entities that depend on mission-critical applications running in their on-premises VMware environment.

Here's the resulting architecture diagram of the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. Description of mig_hcx_ocvs_topology.png follows
Description of the illustration mig_hcx_ocvs_topology.png

The following are the types of VMware HCX migrations:
  • Migration with vMotion: HCX vMotion uses the standard VMware vMotion protocol to migrate individual VMs between environments without service interruption. HCX can also migrate powered-off VMs from an on-premises environment to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution by using the VMware NFC protocol.
  • Bulk migrations: Bulk migration uses the VMware vSphere Replication protocols to move the VMs to a destination site. This migration method is designed for moving VMs in parallel, and it can be performed on a predefined schedule. The VMs run at the source site until the failover begins. The service interruption with the bulk migration is equivalent to a reboot.

Note:

Other types of migration are supported with VMware HCX, such as replication-assisted migration and OS-assisted migration. However, those types are not covered in this solution because they demand specific assessments of connectivity and other settings that require more details.