Enterprise admins usually value their time which is precious. At the end of the day, the working day has only 24 hours, so every min saved counts. Same for hardware savings, when you need to implement a new application in production, you first need a testing environment. If you don't have testing environment because there is not enough capacity within your production environment, you need cloud environment. Today we'll have a look at the possibilities and why Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Ravello Service Is a Good Choice for DevOps.
Our previous posts about Ravello were written mostly to understand the ins and outs of the service, how to upload VMs without changing anything (time saver) or how to create a VM from scratch. We have also detailed why Ravello claims up to 14x speed increase with their new offering and Bare-Metal option. Their Oracle Cloud backed infrastructure allows running VMs with up to 32 vCPU which satisfies very demanding applications too.
Last, but not least, we have also talked about training and creation and managing of training classes with students and remote access management for those students. Anyone can do it easily. Check our latest blog post on that – How-To Create a Training Class Through Ravello Training Platform.
Ravello's Cloning Capability
Ravello has a capability of cloning a production environment where selected VMs are simply copied and uploaded to the cloud without changes. Once there, Ravello creates an overlay network to match the On-prem network and basically you as an admin has nothing to do.
This can easily be used for scaling out and testing. When building a new application, you usually build it and tested on a small scale as you don't have enough hardware in your local data center to test large scale. Ravello allows you to do that.
Quote:
Ravello Service (Ravello) is an overlay cloud service that enables enterprises to run their VMware and KVM applications with data-center-like (Layer 2) networking “as-is” on public clouds without making any modifications. Because enterprises don’t need to convert their VMs or change their networking, they can rapidly develop and deploy existing datacenter applications on the public cloud without the associated infrastructure and migration costs or the overhead for a variety of use cases such as proofs of concept, development, testing, staging, user acceptance testing, production, and training.
Ravello's UI is pretty intuitive, and their online resource center is well documented to get you started. You'll get used to it very fast.
Developing of applications is certainly not easy. (personally, I'm not developper). Coding is only part of the equation. You also have the build management, build testing (and storing). Imagine having 3 different builds running side-by-side in your datacenter which does not have enough resources….
Impossible without external testing.
That's why Ravello is a logical choice for DevOps environments.
An Example of DevOps on Ravello
And I don't know if you know, but Ravello you pay only when you really use it. In fact, by using Ravello you save costs by providing your teams with the ability to run, test and use staging environments only for the duration they are needed. Once you're done with your tests you can stop, save them for later or destroy them.
Note: By default, each VM stops after 2 h. But you can easily change that.
Ravello's cloning capability for Blueprints
Once you set up your environment in Ravello, you can save it As Blueprint. This allows your Multi-VM application to be saved as a Blueprint.
Blueprint is a self-contained set of definitions that describe your Ravello application, which can be used to create instances and deploy them on the cloud.
You can deploy clones of the blueprint on cloud regions of choice using the application design or API call.
The advantage of Blueprints for DevOps
By using Ravello’s blueprinting and sharing features, the admin can do a snapshot of an entire test environment to capture the exact state of the application. For example, there has been a Microsoft Patch which is suspected to alter the performance of the application. So the idea is to save it as blueprint before the patch installation and then comparing both versions.
Or there can be a bug which has been discovered. As you can save the whole environment “as is” you can then share the blueprint with the other DevOps teams to reproduce and show them the bug and work on the fix. .
Once you have a blueprint created from your application, you can use that blueprint to deploy a new application based on that blueprint.
Check a Detailed PDF from Ravello about Building Sample DevOps Environment on Ravello.
https://cloud.oracle.com/iaas/whitepapers/devops_oci_ravello.pdf
How to test Ravello for vExperts
With your vExpert account, you can try Ravello with vExpert access. If this is for your own tests of a production environment of your company or for the lab, you’re free to test it. Ravello is definitely moving forward and provides interesting alternatives for today's application and cost-effective solutions for DevOps, training or production workloads.
I have created a couple of posts in the past, you might want to look at them to get you started:
- How to Assign a Public IP Which Persists Across Reboots for Ravello VMs
- How to Get Started with Ravello Systems – VM Import Tool
- How to create a simple VM in Ravello?
- How-to Install VMware Tools on VM which runs in Ravello Cloud?
Wrap Up
Ravello is definitely a choice for VMware Workloads. If it is for tests or production, Ravello has the resources to handle the demand. After you copy your production environment to Ravello, the new replicated environment has the same VM configuration, the same network (IP addresses, DNS names ), and the same storage as your production environment and your VMs work exactly as if they were on your private data center. It's a huge time saver as you don't have to rebuild the environment from scratch.
Ravello REST API is used to create an application from a saved blueprint. The application can then be published to a different cloud region depending on your needs and requirements. It allows IT and DevOps teams to be more agile, more efficient. Check Ravello website here and sign for a Free Trial.
More from ESX Virtualization
- How to Assign a Public IP Which Persists Across Reboots for Ravello VMs
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- VMworld 2018
- Free Tools
- Install and Configure VMware vCSA 6.7
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