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SAN FRANCISCO—When Microsoft changed CEOs in February 2014 and decided to go into cahoots with Linux developers and the open source community, it represented a major breakthrough in the IT business. Then in late 2018, IBM announced that it would acquire Red Hat (the deal closed for $34 billion on July 9), ending a lot of sales competitiveness and adding some creativity in the market.
Now, as amazing as it seems, VMware and Oracle—sworn enemies for years, though not in the open source world—are now playing nicely together in catering to all those thousands of customers globally who are using them both in the data center and in the cloud.
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Five or six years ago, who knew all these scenes would take place? Safe to say that it’s about time this happened.
Late on Day 1 of Oracle OpenWorld 2019, the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based enterprise IT company made a brief announcement that it had, in fact, listened to enough customers to know that it had to grin, bear it and shake hands with VMware, which has been a competitor for 20 years, in order to get new-gen deployments up and running faster and more effectively for their many customers in common.
Both Companies Have Many Customers in Common
It was reciprocal for VMware, which has a component or components in an estimated 98 percent of all enterprise IT systems on Earth—including most of those with Oracle databases.
The partnership aims to help mutual customers coordinate the companies’ enterprise software and cloud solutions to make the move to the cloud. Using this new direction, customers will be able to support their hybrid cloud strategies by running VMware Cloud Foundation on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. With this new solution, customers should be able to migrate VMware vSphere workloads to Oracle’s Generation 2 Cloud Infrastructure and take advantage of consistent infrastructure and operations.
As part of this new deal, Oracle also will provide technical support for Oracle software running in VMware environments both in customer on-premise data centers and Oracle-certified cloud environments, the company said.
“VMware is delighted that for the first time, Oracle will officially offer technical support for Oracle products running on VMware. This is a win-win for customers,” Sanjay Poonen, COO of Customer Operations at VMware, said in a media advisory.
Running VMware Workloads in Oracle Cloud
With this announcement, Oracle becomes a partner in the VMware Cloud Provider Program and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution will be sold by Oracle and its partners. The solution will be based on VMware Cloud Foundation and will deliver a full stack software-defined data center (SDDC) including VMware vSphere, NSX and vSAN. Through consistent infrastructure and operations, customers will be able to migrate and modernize applications, seamlessly moving workloads between on-premise environments and Oracle Cloud.
Users will be able to use Oracle services, such as Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Exadata Cloud Service and Oracle Database Cloud, which run in the same cloud data centers, on the same networks, with a consistent portal and APIs. They also will be able to leverage Oracle’s rapidly expanding footprint of global regions to scale globally without needing to establish their own data centers.
Oracle will provide administrative access to the underlying physical servers, enabling a level of control previously only possible on premise, and customers will be able to use VMware vCenter to manage both their on-premise clusters and Oracle Cloud-based SDDCs through a single pane of glass. Oracle will also provide first line technical support for this solution, the company said.
“As more of our customers make the move to cloud, they’re looking for a superior VMware experience. Oracle Cloud customers will be able to run VMware workloads in Oracle Cloud and retain VMware administrative access,” Don Johnson, EVP of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said in a media advisory.
“This is made possible by Layer 2 networking in the cloud and our bare metal service. Customers will be able to extend existing VMware investments, processes, and tools while benefiting from the security and performance of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure,” Johnson said.
Safe to say a whole lot of enterprise customers will be smiling after they hear this announcement.