Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is based on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and provides a fully supported, customizable cloud environment for VMware deployments and migrations. The solution delivers a full-stack software-defined data center (SDDC), including VMware’s vCenter, ESXi, NSX, and vSAN. Specific use cases targeted by Oracle Cloud VMware Solution include data center and application migration, hybrid extension, on-demand capacity, and disaster recovery.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is available in all Oracle Cloud regions.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is a customer managed solution that provides a native VMware cloud environment on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which is highly secure, highly performing, and globally available.

Yes. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution easily can be connected to other Oracle Cloud Infrastructure service offerings, such as Oracle Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS).

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution supports the Dense I/O series—DenseIO.52 (X7) and DenseIO.E4—of bare metal shapes. It also supports the Standard series—Standard2 (X7), Standard3 (X9), and Standard.E4—of bare metal shapes.

We’ll continue to have X7 capacity in the existing regions (as of March 2022) and will let customers consume Oracle Cloud VMware Solution on X7 for their commit periods.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution supports provisioning of vSphere 7.x. Oracle used to provide commercially reasonable support for provisioning of vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 until VMware's General Support phase for those versions ended on October 15, 2022, and the Technical Guidance phase ensued. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution shape support is limited to the shapes supported at the end of General Support. New Oracle Cloud VMware Solution shapes introduced after October 15, 2022, won't be enabled for vSphere 6.5 or 6.7. At the end of the Technical Guidance phase for vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 on November 15, 2023, customers will no longer be able to provision using those versions.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution supports VMware cluster deployments up to the current VMware limit of 64 instances. Additional host instances can be added at any time up to the maximum supported in the customer's tenancy based on OCI service limits. Note: The customer will use VMware software and tooling to define additional clusters within vCenter Server. The Oracle Cloud VMware Solution SDDC can contain more than 64 hosts, but each cluster has a current maximum of 64based on VMware limits. Please note that standard shapes are limited to 8 instances.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution supports a single ESXi host SDDC for a single node SDDC (available only in Dense shapes) or a minimum of three ESXi hosts for a multihost SDDC.

A single node SDDC is limited to a global maximum of 10 across tenancies and regions.

Please refer to the service descriptions (PDF) for details.

Please refer to the service descriptions (PDF) for details.

High availability configuration works only in multihost clusters (three or more hosts). All other features that work with a multihost will work with a single host.

Additional VMware product suites are expected to function as advertised on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution based on the VMware compatibility matrix.

No, the customer or the customer’s operating partner is responsible for all VMware configuration, patching, operations, and application deployment.

The BYOL VMware license model isn’t supported for core Oracle Cloud VMware Solution components (vSphere, vSAN, and NSX). This is the VMware standard across all public cloud offerings.

The licensing policy for Oracle software, including Oracle Database, running on virtualized environments hasn’t changed. Customers that deploy Oracle software on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution are subject to Oracle’s current server/hardware partitioning policy (PDF).

Customers need to buy the licenses for attached VMware services, such as Site Recovery Manager, Horizon, vRealize Suite, and Tanzu.

Customers need to buy the licenses for attached VMware services, such as Site Recovery Manager, Horizon VDI, vRealize Suite, and Tanzu.

You can use VMware HCX to migrate workloads to a 3-node production SDDC or use your preferred method of migrating the workload from one SDDC to the other.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution supports an automated guided workflow along with some manual steps to initiate and upgrade to VMware vSphere 7 from older versions. It automates updating an SDDC, providing a downloadable link for binaries and licenses and performing a rolling upgrade of the host to bring it to the latest version. Please refer to the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution documentation for detailed step-by-step instructions.

Once an SDDC upgrade is complete, the Details page provides you with the links for VMware Cloud Foundation bundle binaries and licenses. The downloadable link is a preauthenticated read-only object storage bucket URL pointing to the vCenter component bundle and NSX-T Data Center bundle.

If you need assistance with any binaries or licenses, please submit a ticket at My Oracle Support.

Once an SDDC upgrade is complete, from the list of ESXi hosts to be upgraded, select each host and upgrade to the latest version. The new host created will be with the existing host configuration. Once the workloads are migrated from the old host to the new ESXi host, old ESXi hosts need to be deleted. The new ESXi host will be billed hourly; there’s no minimum eight-hour charge on this host, unlike with the regular hourly SKU. Any term commitments assigned to the old host are moved to the new host when the old host is deleted and have the same terms as the original commitment.

You’ll receive a notification for the old hosts to be deleted; the new hosts will be billed hourly until the old hosts are deleted.

You can provision block volumes from 50 GB to 32 TB in 1 GB increments.

You can attach up to 32 block volumes per host.

At this time the maximum performance supported is up to 50 volume performance units (VPUs).

Multipathing, backup polices, auto-performance, cross-region replication, and VPUs above 50 aren't supported by Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.

Bare metal Dense shapes have vSAN with local NVMe as storage. Storage can be extended by adding additional hosts or external storage as OCI Block Storage or NFS. Bare metal Standard series shapes use OCI Block Storage as the primary data store. You can extend the storage capacity by adding additional block volumes or using NFS as external storage.

You can add up to eight ESXi hosts to a single block volume.

When you select block volume beyond 20 VPUs, assign any device path.

Please refer to the pricing document for the latest pricing information.

The different commitment terms are hourly, monthly, one year, and three years. Monthly commitment is available only for Dense shapes.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution supports a minimum commitment term of eight hours using the hourly commitment option.

If the host is deleted before the end of the commit period, the host will continue to be billed for the duration of the commitment.

No, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution is billed via a single SKU per host in the customer’s usage reports and includes both infrastructure and VMware license access.

Yes. Customers should observe VMware's guidance and recommendations for the monitoring tools in question.

Standard Oracle Cloud telemetry isn’t available because no agent is installed in the ESXi bare metal instance. However, customers can get compute and network telemetry data from VMware directly in ESXi, vCenter, and NSX-T administrative interfaces or via the APIs provided as part of these offerings.

Oracle provides tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 customer support for all support-related issues.

Oracle provides support for core VMware Cloud Foundation components (vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, and NSX) that we license and deploy.