Oracle Cloud VMware Solution—Ready for Today's Operational Mission

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Government agencies fully understand that migrating to the cloud can be challenging. As with many commercial businesses, agency IT leaders also have to manage process disruptions, unexpected costs, integration issues, security and compliance requirements, and change management realities.

As cloud technology gains wider acceptance as part of the federal Cloud Smart strategy, there's a clear demand for expertise and capability to help agencies more easily make the move with security, costs, and performance in mind.

Oracle and VMware recently teamed on a FedRAMP High, DISA Impact Level 5 certified solution that can help government now by providing a full-fidelity VMware experience. A government agency's on-premises VMware environment may be migrated to the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution without any changes and with immediate productivity on a cloud platform. The two companies discussed their advances and alliance during a recent technology panel webinar.

During the discussion, Robert Ames, Senior Director, National Technology Strategy at VMware, and Janice Haith, Strategic Client Executive for Oracle Public Sector and former CIO for the U.S. Navy, said the new Oracle Cloud VMware Solution eases cloud transition with security, predictability and control.

Oracle's Mark Johnson hosts a panel of IT strategists. They discuss how Oracle Cloud VMware Solution delivers security, predictability and control for operationally critical, VMware-based applications operating in Oracle Cloud.
Featuring:
Janice Haith, Oracle former CIO, US Navy
Craig Bowman, VMware, Senior Director, Federal Sales
 Robert Ames, VMware, Senior Director, National Technology Strategy

Mission-Ready Security

Cyber security is top of mind for every agency today. Sophisticated ransomware attacks and others targeting critical IT infrastructure are forcing industry and government to work together on innovative, proactive approaches. Security is an important benefit of the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, noted Craig Bowman, Senior Director, Federal Sales at VMware. "For a long time, security and network teams have been separate, so we build infrastructure and then we expect security teams to go secure that infrastructure," said Bowman. "The reality is that the future for networking will be mostly virtualized. We will be establishing software-defined routers, switches, [and] servers. Everything will be able to scale up and scale down based on the needs of the mission. And what that means is that we're going to have to virtualize all security. When we talk about zero-trust we're talking about being able to deploy security in virtual environments in real time, to ensure that any time we change the network that security goes with it."

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution incorporates security-first design architecture with full tenant isolation—the physical machines are not shared with other tenants, or with Oracle administrators. There are no 'managed service' security implications to consider; access is private and entirely under customer control. Additionally, because of the architecture of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, all on premises security policies in the VMware environment are transposed, 1-to-1 into the cloud. With Oracle security-first architecture, VMware hardened security policies, FedRAMP High and DISA Impact Level 5, The Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is an ideal platform for government operations.

Predictable Costs and Performance

The panelists also pointed to predictability of costs and application system performance. Having a clear understanding of the cost and being able to predict future expenses helps agencies establish budgets over several years and there are no surprises when service bills come in, Haith said. "It allows them to plan; they know where they can shift money that they saved from leases, building costs and infrastructure to other missions and operations," she said.  This is a solution that the workforce can embrace predictably as there are no skills-retraining required. Migration from VMware on-prem to off-prem, into Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

Budgets and costs matter. The Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is designed to provide cost transparency and predictability for customers, Ames said. Senior government leaders sometimes have a difficult time predicting how much a given technology platform is going to cost in the future, he said, and this solution addresses the challenge. For example, an organization might move workloads from one environment to another, whether it's from on-premises to a cloud or from one cloud service to another and discover the move affected latency and performance. Then they move again to address the issue. That can impact cost by increasing fees from the cloud providers—something that the organization didn't count on when starting out, according to Bowman. Bowman added, "when customers move payloads into a cloud and realized latencies and then needed to move it again. When they moved it, they were charged with ingress and egress fees." Customers didn't expect performance issues."

Oracle solution delivers predictable costs and performance.

According to the panelists, Oracle's unique, bare-metal cloud architecture delivers optimal performance for all applications operating in Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. The solution scales for missions with heavy compute, massive data and high-transaction requirements. "Bare metal brings greater predictability of performance, [so] the entire stack is going to be much more predictable in its performance and there's a better sense of how things are going to scale," Ames said. It provides a foundation to run VMware without contention with server agents and hypervisors running on the cloud infrastructure, said Bowman.

Control and Operational Cadence

The Oracle Cloud VMware solution allows organizations to create and manage VMware software defined data centers (SDDCs) in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The customer fully manages managed, native VMware-based cloud environment, it features full control, using familiar VMware tools, so agencies can move or extend VMware-based workloads to the cloud without having to redesign applications or retool operations. The platform provides full access to the features of a VMware software defined data center and offers high availability because all VMware components are distributed across different fault domains within the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) region's. OCI provides workflows that simplify SDDC creation and networking configuration. SDDCs are configured with VLANs, which support applications that need high performance layer 2 networking to run in the public cloud.

Another plus is that the migration of on premises VMware workloads to an Oracle Cloud VMware Solution can be seamless because the SDDC network design may be transposed, as is, to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution without any network configuration changes. Its can be configured to communicate with other OCI resources as well, such as compute instances, database systems, and autonomous databases. Possible use cases for the platform include migrating VMware workloads to the cloud while maintaining a single, integrated view to manage a cloud or hybrid environment; operating a hybrid cloud with native VMware tools; and business continuity and disaster recovery, with the platform adding resiliency by bridging an agency's existing infrastructure to an alternate site on Oracle Cloud.

Deployment Made Easy

One of the more appealing aspects of the solution for any agency is the ease with which it can be deployed in existing virtual environments. "In simple terms, it's like a cut and paste for the data center," said Ames. "You can take your on-premise VMware environment and basically cut and paste it into the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. This will greatly accelerate moves to the cloud for agencies." Oracle's Haith concurs. "The idea of a cut-and-paste environment is phenomenal for government," she said. It would allow government to move to the cloud faster, more smoothly, and at a lower cost, she said. Perhaps even more importantly, Haith notes, is that agencies can "move to the cloud without worrying about their operations failing.". For agencies ready to begin deploying this solution, Haith suggested that agency IT departments talk with Oracle and VMware first. Experts will offer a clear plan and articulate how it best fits into the agency's strategy. Oracle Cloud VMware solution is a unique example of how two technology giants can collaborate on a product that has the potential to deliver significant business benefits in today's fast changing environment.

For more information, visit: www.oracle.com/vmware and www.vmware.com/go/federal-govt.

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