Oracle Corp. today launched the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, a VMware environment delivered as a service that the company says provides features not offered by any of the top infrastructure-as-a-service providers.

The offering is available both on Oracle’s public cloud and its recently introduced on-premises private cloud platform.

VMware Inc.’s virtualization software is used in countless data centers worldwide to power applications. Moving those applications to the cloud can be tricky because they have to be reconfigured, and sometimes rewritten, for the new environment. With its new offering, Oracle is hoping to make it easier for enterprises to adopt the cloud by providing an environment closely similar to their existing on-premise VMware environments, which means applications don’t have to be rewritten.

Oracle has a specific audience in mind with the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. There are also VMware-as-a-service offerings on rival clouds, but they are often delivered on a managed basis, meaning enterprises lose some control over their environments. According to Oracle, its offering can better meet the needs of organizations that wish to retain control over their environments by providing security and customizability features not available from rivals.

The first such feature is what Oracle calls its zero-trust operating model. “After a customer deploys Oracle Cloud VMware Solution into their Oracle Cloud Infrastructure tenancy, Oracle no longer has access to their credentials or VMware configuration,” Clive D’Souza, senior director of cloud infrastructure engineering at Oracle, wrote in a blog post. “ This design reflects our “zero-trust” operating model, which assures customers that we remove ourselves from their environments after a solution is deployed in their tenancy.”

Another feature Oracle says is not matched by the top three cloud providers is the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution’s customizability. Enterprises can choose which version of VMware’s vSphere virtualization software they want to use, which security patches to apply and when. They can also use VMware’s complementary administrator tools to perform maintenance tasks much like they would on-premises. 

“Customers can bring their existing tooling and operational best practices directly to the cloud without any time-consuming upskilling or reskilling requirements on their workforce,” D’Souza explained.

Under the hood, the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is based on the same specification as VMware’s VMware Cloud Foundation product. It includes VMware’s three core platforms for virtualizing compute, network and storage resources as well as the vCenter management software. Also included is the Dell Technologies Inc. subsidiary’s HCX product, which helps migrate workloads between on-premises servers and the public cloud.

The Oracle Cloud VMware Solution can be deployed on public and private cloud clusters with three to 64 bare-metal instances. Each instance has 52 OCPUs, the basic unit of processing power in Oracle’s cloud. There’s also 768 gigabytes of memory and 51.2 terabytes of NVMe flash storage per node. 

“People don’t throw away all their old stuff and go to the new stuff by snapping your fingers,” Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison (pictured) said during a discussion of the solution with VMware Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger. “There’s a huge investment in VMware technologies, there’s a huge investment in Oracle technologies that’s preserved. As you shift to the cloud, you can start taking advantage of that next generation of technologies without any trauma.”

Photo: Oracle