Implementing Internal And/or External Oracle Clouds

By Author: Nate Rodney
Total Articles: 499
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To successfully plan, design, deploy and support an internal and/or external Oracle Cloud, an infrastructure assessment (IA) and gap analysis (GA) should be performed to match the customer’s business needs with the Oracle Cloud architecture and operational support structure. While implementing an internal and/or external Oracle Cloud, you should consider many aspects like broad network access, simplicity, reproducibility, usability, scalability, supportability and security.

Layers of Oracle Cloud
In cloud computing, there are 3 layers: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS).
1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Infrastructure as a Service is the capability to provision and deliver fundamental computing resources as a service to the consumer. With an Oracle Cloud, IaaS consists of Oracle VM for x86 with Linux, Solaris, and Windows virtual machines managed by Oracle Enterprise Manager.
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS): Platform as a Service is the capability to host and allow access to a computing platform and software stack ...
... for application development. The provider hosts the computing platform and software stack on the cloud infrastructure that is accessed by the consumer. The consumer manages the computing platform and software stack used for application development. With an Oracle Cloud, PaaS consists of Oracle Databases and Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies.
3. Software as a Service (SaaS): Software as a Service is the capability to host and deliver applications over the Internet, accessible from various client devices. The provider manages the cloud infrastructure and application portfolio that is accessed by the consumer. SaaS is all about the Oracle applications.
In each cloud layer, the design should encompass the software, hardware, storage, and network components required to deploy a scalable, secure, and supportable internal and/or external Oracle Cloud.

Infrastructure assessment and gap analysis
Prior to implementing an Oracle Cloud, it’s important that an infrastructure assessment (IA) and gap analysis (GA) be performed. During the IA/GA, the architecture of the solution should match the customer’s business needs while maintaining the integrity with other aspects of implementation.

Oracle VM for x86 hardware architecture
Selecting the right hardware for your Oracle VM environment is a critical component in the success of your Oracle Cloud project. The resource requirements of all the virtual machines provide the aggregate CPU, RAM and storage requirements necessary to calculate the Oracle VM servers’ hardware requirements. For example, a single Oracle VM server supports up to 160 CPU cores or threads, 2TB of memory and a maximum of 128 virtual disks.

Oracle VM server pool
Oracle VM uses the concept of a "server pool" to group together and centrally manage one or more server pools with up to 32 Oracle VM servers. If more than one location exists, Oracle VM server pools may be dispersed to different locations. Oracle VM Manager with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c provides a single point of administration for one or more dispersed Oracle VM server pools.

Oracle VM server pools can accommodate organization-specific needs, i.e., Oracle technology license management (hard and soft partitioning), defense in depth, the principle of least privilege, compartmentalization of information, security domains and different applications and their performance, authentication, and security requirements.

Planning disaster recovery
Restoration of the primary site's services at a disaster recovery site requires a replica of the primary site's physical and virtual resources at the disaster recovery site. A disaster recovery site hosts a replica of the primary site's Oracle VM physical and virtual resources, i.e. server hardware, networks, storage, infrastructure services, virtual disks, and virtual machine configuration files. A disaster recovery site can be a warm fail-over site waiting idle to respond to a disastrous occurrence.

Overall, while designing for an Oracle Cloud, the best practices should be analyzed carefully and decisions should be made based on organizational needs, existing architecture, and budget resource availability.

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