Oracle announced its new hybrid cloud partnership with VMware on September 16, 2019. The objective behind this partnership is to help customers to use companies' enterprise software to its fullest and provide cloud solutions to make the move to the cloud. This new partnership will enable customers to support their hybrid cloud strategies by making it run VMware Cloud Foundation on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This new solution will also allow customers to easily migrate VMware vSphere workloads to Oracle's Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure and can take advantage of consistent infrastructure and operations. In this partnership, Oracle declared that it will also provide technical support for Oracle software that is running in VMware environments, both in customer on-premise data centers and Oracle-certified cloud environments. Oracle also allows controlling where your data resides, if you are very concerned about your company data. All in one, it now offers a fully VMware Cloud Foundation-certified solution in the Oracle Cloud.
This seems to be more appealing for the existing Oracle customers those who always wished to have a consolidated cloud billing. You as a user have the liberty to add this service to an existing Oracle account and enjoy the advantages of its universal credit pricing. This may or may not save your money over Amazon or Microsoft. All the cloud vendors have already published their pricings and then have negotiated pricing for large customers. In the end, everything depends on your specific storage wants and needs.
Management Control
Oracle strives for offering the best flexibility possible in the case of vSphere and Oracle version. Oracle understands that not every enterprise customer has upgraded and provides support for all Oracle software, whereas, other offerings only support the latest and greatest version of vSphere. Support is provided to a large number of Oracle database versions. For the smooth management interface, companies invest a lot of time and money to train their IT team on xCenter and PowerCLI. Both these tools are carefully supported in the Oracle Cloud.
Oracle supports hybrid cloud, which means, you are allowed to run some resources already running in your own data center along with some in the Oracle cloud and everything is managed from the vCenter interface. It also allows you to run everything in the Oracle Cloud and manage it locally from the vCenter. Due to this, the amount of retraining gets reduced that might be needed, if you go with a multi-cloud approach.
For balancing infrastructure, Oracle uses Terraform. Terraform is used for a long time now, as it performs the function of provisioning resources in an automated manner. Terraform is supported on AWS and Azure as well. Microsoft has documentation on how you can get started using Terraform to deploy infrastructure to Azure and other clouds. In-fact, it's a feasible way to perform automated multi-cloud infrastructure management.
Hardware Control
All VMware cases run on Oracle's software and storage infrastructure. This makes VMware come in direct access with other Oracle products that are running in the same environment. It also gives you access to a high-end performance that you need. To reduce the overall cost in terms of the CPU usage, you should run a highly tuned Oracle database on Oracle hardware.
Oracle provides some additional and special capabilities that are missing with the other cloud vendors. On networking that includes Layer 2 access. Other cloud vendors require third-party add-ons to make VMware NSX work on their infrastructure. On the other hand, this is not required in the Oracle Cloud and you can actually run natively, just as you would run it on your own hardware.
Wrapping Up
The partnership between VMware and Oracle makes sense for the existing customers of both the parties, as Oracle cloud provides more control over the data. There is a no-brainer for the Oracle and VMware users. The issue only occurs when you are working in AWS and Azure also.
You need to get hands-on experience working with Terraform to understand how to deploy your resource requirements with a DevOps approach. Terraform is also important when you use multiple cloud vendor environments. Here, the basic concept remains the same as those in Azure and AWS, based upon a templating approach to establish baselines for specific workloads.