Enterprise Friendly vSphere Cloud Service
Do you want to own the management of your vSphere on Cloud deployment? Or would you prefer to consume a managed service for vSphere on Cloud? I suspect opinions will be divided here, some favoring self-managed and some choosing a managed service. In our project with the CTO Advisor team, where we built out the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS). We saw a self-managed platform rather than a managed service. Self-managed does not need to mean self-deployed; the OCVS cluster deploy wizard is as slick and clean as we have seen. But once the OCVS has deployed your cluster, the rest is up to you. You get full access to manage as you see fit, even root access to the ESXi hosts if that is what you need.
Managed services have their own opinions
The whole point of a managed service is that the vendor has decided the right way to do something and will do that thing their right way for you. Every managed service is an expression of an opinion about the right way to deliver that service, and those opinions are often about a compromise. Often services that are simple to contain more opinions and are less flexible. If you are moving your vSphere to the Cloud because you don’t want to manage any vSphere, then using a managed service will deliver you a simple experience. But if you are retaining on-premises vSphere, can you get the same simplicity and opinionated service on-premises? I have not yet seen a vSphere on cloud service that will reach back into your datacentre and deliver you vSphere as a service in your datacentre that is the same as the vSphere on Cloud.
Enterprises also have opinions
For the last decade or so, most enterprise IT organizations have operated vSphere as core infrastructure and have learned to be very effective at running vSphere. The on-premises vSphere design is usually highly opinionated and fitted to the technical and business requirements of the specific enterprise. Adopting a vSphere on cloud platform should mandate that you re-architect your vSphere design; you probably want to continue to run vSphere the way your organization has learned to fit your organization.
Oracle Cloud VMware Service has few opinions
The Oracle version of vSphere on Cloud is aimed at enterprises that want the Cloud-based vSphere to conform to their on-premises standards. The primary opinion Oracle embeds in the service is that deployment of the vSphere, VSAN, and NSX components should be automated and that their control ends when the cluster is deployed. Once your OCVS cluster is deployed, you have full control of the environment. You get to manage your own vSphere updates; you could keep running vSphere 6.5 for as long as you need. You get root credentials on your ESXi servers, so if you need to install VIBs to make your data protection application work, you can. You have full control of your vCentre environment; we setup linked mode with our on-premises vCentre just the same as any other new vSphere deployment on the WAN.
Whose opinion do you want?
If you would like to have vSphere on Cloud that is as similar as possible to your on-premises vSphere, then a managed service is probably not for you. The Oracle Cloud VMware Solution allows a large amount of flexibility for enterprises with experience running vSphere. If you are going to the Cloud to spend less time managing vSphere, then this is not the right product for you.
Disclosure: This blog post forms part of a project commissioned and paid for by Oracle. Oracle has had no editorial oversight and has not seen this article before it was published.