Customers deploying Oracle workloads have requirements such as stringent SLAs, continued high performance, and application availability. It is a major challenge for business organizations to manage data storage in these environments due to these rigorous business requirement.
Common issues presented when using traditional storage solutions for business-critical application (BCA) include inadequate performance, scale-in/scale-out, storage inefficiency, complex management, and high deployment and operating costs.
With more and more production servers being virtualized, the demand for highly converged server-based storage is surging. VMware Virtual SAN aims at providing a highly scalable, available, reliable, and high-performance storage using cost-effective hardware, specifically direct-attached disks in VMware ESXi hosts. Virtual SAN adheres to a new policy-based storage management paradigm, which simplifies and automates complex management workflows that exist in traditional enterprise storage systems with respect to configuration and clustering.
Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster enables active/active data centers that are separated by metro distance.
VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service that enables customers to run applications across vSphere-based cloud environments with access to a broad range of AWS services. Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, this service integrates vSphere, vSAN and NSX along with VMware vCenter management, and is optimized to run on dedicated, elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure. ESXi hosts in VMware Cloud on AWS reside in an AWS availability Zone (AZ) and are protected by vSphere HA.
The use case for deploying VMware Cloud on AWS are multi-fold namely
- Data Center Extension & DR
- Cloud Migration
- Application modernization & Next-Generation Apps build out
A new feature called Stretched Clusters for VMware Cloud on AWS is designed to protect against an AWS availability zone failure. Now applications can span multiple AWS Availability Zones (AZ) within a VMware Cloud on AWS cluster.
With the release of Virtual SAN Stretched Cluster followed by VMware Cloud for AWS and recently ,Stretched Clusters for VMware Cloud on AWS, applications which have stringent requirements such as very high SLA’s, continued high performance, and application availability can now take dual advantage of being deployed on the cloud along with having high availability across multiple AZ’s in the Stretched Clusters for VMware Cloud on AWS deployment model.
The paper Oracle Workloads and VMware Cloud on AWS: Deployment, Migration, and Configuration describes the deployment, migration options along with best practices when migrating Oracle workloads on VMware on-premises to VMware Cloud on AWS and Stretched Clusters for VMware Cloud on AWS.
