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| Ravello Scooter, circa 2014 |
Also, they had scooters.
I stopped by the booth that year and had a chance to speak with some really smart and enthusiastic people about nested virtualization. And while it's been a few years, I'm confident that I spoke with Shruti Bhat, who presented Ravello's solutions to the tech bloggers at Virtualization Field Day in 2015. She set me up with some complimentary access to the solution (this was back when I was a #vExpert, after all), and I walked away from the booth pretty excited about where this tech would lead us.
Lots of home labs popped up in Ravello shortly thereafter. People were really excited about this stuff.
Skip ahead to 2016: Oracle buys Ravello, and we assume the worst: Ravello is the walking dead, a promising solution that's about to be assimilated into... something. Things get quiet, time passes. We pack away the scooters, neatly fold our "Clouds are for the birds... my VMs are nested" t-shirts, and move along.
The Rebirth of Slick
But now, Ravello is back in a big way. And not just with an exciting roadmap of features, but also with a clear direction and place in Oracle's cloud strategy. Here's a quick overview for you.On-Prem to Cloud Migration
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| It's only slightly more complicated than this image suggests. |
The HVX Hypervisor
We don't spend a lot of time talking about Type 2 hypervisors these days, but HVX might change that. Initially, Ravello was a consumer of AWS and Google cloud resources, so they were required to build their solution within the elastic instances in the cloud. But Oracle's cloud removes that constraint, and we can expect to see a Type 1 version of HVX in a future release. If we've learned anything about virtualization, it's that the closer your hypervisor is to compute, memory, and storage, the faster your VMs will run. Expect major performance increases when HVX attains Type 1 status in Oracle's Bare Metal Cloud.Blueprints
Personally, I cringe when I see the word blueprints used in cloud workspaces, because it makes me think of people who use the word "architect" as a verb. And it attempts to elevate routine tasks into something grand. Nevertheless, the word persists.
In Ravello's defense, they have a refreshingly simple interface to use when you are connecting your nested VMs using the magic of overlays. It's got a slick UX, too. Just connect your VMs to the network topology that you create in the cloud, and you're good. Yes, I'm oversimplifying. But not by much.SDN, With Actual Purpose
The networking magic is what makes Ravello so compelling. SDN is among the most over-used and mis-understood topics in tech, most often because vendors struggle to explain why the technology is relevant to their customer's use cases. Ravello doesn't suffer that problem, though.Ravello's SDN enables the forklifting of your on-prem VMs through an importing process. But when your VM is uploaded to Ravello, how does it communicate with your other VMs? Through an SDN solution, that's how. You can either roll your own virtual network, or use Automatic Network Generation and Auto Binding to have Ravello do the work for you. This is insanely useful if you're less interested in networking and more interested in testing your application.
Basically, Ravello went into hiding after the Oracle acquisition, and now we are getting a peek into what they're been up to. Cool tech and practical use cases: a rare combination these days!
Note: Many thanks to John Troyer for setting up #rbd1, and for also setting up a post-event personal demo with Simon Law from Oracle.