Oracle’s Ravello Simplifies Public Cloud Migration In A Unique Way @OracleCloud

In February 2016, Oracle announced its acquisition of an interesting startup called Ravello Systems. The young startup pioneered a technology that would allow enterprises to run their VMware and KVM workloads anywhere — on-premises or in cloud environments, such as AWS or Google Cloud – without having to make any changes or modifications to the virtual machines. Offered as a SaaS solution, Ravello’s goal was to enable organizations to move to hybrid cloud environments with ease.
A year and a half later, Ravello is now part of Oracle Cloud and the service is available on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure in addition to AWS and other public cloud providers.  During the filming of our most recent RoadCast video series, we met with Abhi Gupta, Director of Product Management at Oracle, to get more insight into Ravello on Oracle cloud.
Gupta explains that Ravello is an overlay cloud service, which enables enterprises to take their VMware-based applications to the public cloud as they are without having to make any modifications to the VMs, network or storage. The technology essentially allows organizations to leverage public cloud resources in their current data center environments.

And since organizations don’t have to make any changes to their on-prem applications in order to move them to the cloud, one of the Ravello’s key capabilities is that it can significantly accelerate the transition to a cloud environment, Gupta tells us. This means that you can have applications running in the cloud in just a couple of hours.
Ravello’s mission is to simplify the journey to the cloud by eliminating common roadblocks, says Gupta, one of them being the fact that VMware VMs can’t run natively on most of public clouds. This means that enterprises have to spend a lot of time and effort converting their VMs prior to a cloud migration. What’s more, after the conversion the VMs are not easy to bring back on-prem, says Gupta.
Another key challenge that organizations run into is that networking in the public cloud is very different from on-prem data center environments, according to Gupta. This in turn means that organizations have to go through an extensive re-networking process, changing the applications so that they conform to the layer 3 constructs. This also typically involves some tradeoffs, says Gupta, as well as a reexamination of networking security features and capabilities. All of this adds up to a lot of time, money and effort in order to prepare applications for a cloud migration.
Ravello solves these issues in an interesting way by making the public cloud environment look and feel like an on-prem data center environment, Gupta tells us, eliminating the common migration pain-points.
In the video, Gupta also talks about some of the new capabilities that have been recently introduced to Ravello along with some common use cases for Ravello, which include software development, production and pre-production, IT operations and more. He also explains how organizations can get started with Ravello today and where you can learn more about this powerful technology.

Visit Cloud.Oracle.com/en_US/ravello to learn more and get a free trial!