What’s New for Oracle Compute Cloud Service (IaaS)

“Behind every cloud is another cloud.” – Judy Garland

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure allows large businesses and corporations to run their workloads, replicate their networks, and back up their data and databases in the cloud. And I would say in a much easy and efficient way than any other provider!

Oracle provides a free software appliance for accessing cloud storage on-premise. The Oracle Storage Cloud Software Appliance is offered free of charge. You do not get this from Amazon. And from Azure, you do not get as much memory on a VM for a core as you get from Oracle. In addition to the hourly metered service, Oracle also provides a non-metered compute capacity with a monthly subscription so that you can provision resources up to twice the subscribed capacity. This is a way to control the budget through a predictable monthly fee rather than the less controllable pure pay-as-you-go model.

PCMag.com provided recently an excellent overview of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Pat Shuff’s Blog describes in detail the steps for creating an Oracle Linux service on the Oracle Compute Cloud. Glynn Foster’s Blog shows how to create an Oracle Solaris VMs in the Oracle Cloud Compute Service.

Creating an Oracle Compute Service took me (the first time) less than 10 minutes. Accessing it was an immediate process. This is simple, fast, easy and most of all I had no issues whatsoever. OK, I did not find lshw but I installed it in a minute:

yum -y install lshw*
...
Dependency Updated:
  dbus-libs.x86_64 1:1.2.24-8.0.1.el6_6

Complete!

VPN for Engineered Systems: if you need a VPN between Oracle and your own infrastructure, then go to the My Oracle Support Note 2056914.1 and follow its instructions.

Creating an Oracle Storage Volume takes about one minute! Even less, if you have done it few times.

[opc@f24074 ~]$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda2      9.4G  1.9G  7.0G  22% /
tmpfs           7.4G     0  7.4G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/xvda1      479M   81M  369M  18% /boot

Note: before connecting to the Oracle VM from any client, remember to add the IP address(es) to the Security IP list and then update the security rules (add a new one).

Few useful links:

– Oracle Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Training Content
– Using Oracle Compute Cloud Service (IaaS)
– Accessing an Oracle Linux Instance Using SSH
– Frequently Asked Questions for Oracle Compute Cloud Service
– Troubleshooting Oracle Compute Cloud Service
– Best Practices for Using Oracle Compute Cloud Service
– Siebel CRM in Oracle Public Cloud IAAS
– Compute Cloud Pricing / Storage Cloud Pricing / Network Cloud Service Pricing
– Oracle Cloud Services Delivered in Your Data Center / Cloud Machine Documentation

Oracle Cloud Machine Operations: Roles and Responsibilities:

What’s New for Oracle Compute Cloud Service (IaaS):

– Both metered and non-metered options of Oracle Compute Cloud Service are now generally available.
– You can no longer subscribe for 50 or 100 OCPU configurations. Instead, you can specify the required number of 1 OCPU subscriptions.
– If you have a non-metered subscription, you can now provision resources up to twice the subscribed capacity. The additional usage will be charged per hour and billed monthly.
– Oracle provides images for Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Edition.
– Oracle provides images for Oracle Solaris 11.3.
– You can clone storage volumes by taking a snapshot of a storage volume and using it to create new storage volumes.
– You can clone an instance by taking a snapshot and using the resulting image to launch new instances.
– You can increase the size of a storage volume, even when it’s attached to an instance.
– You can now find the public and private IP addresses of each instance on the Instances page. Earlier, this information was displayed only on the instance details page of each instance.
– The CLI tool for uploading custom images to Oracle Storage Cloud Service has been updated to support various operating systems. The tool has also been renamed to uploadcli. Earlier it was called upload-img.

For more details, check What’s New for Oracle Compute Cloud Service (IaaS).

And finally, do you wonder what is the underlying hardware?

[root@f24074 ~]# lshw -short
H/W path    Device  Class      Description
==========================================
                    system     HVM domU
/0                  bus        Motherboard
/0/0                memory     96KiB BIOS
/0/1                processor  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2690 v2 @ 3.00GHz
/0/2                processor  CPU
/0/3                processor  CPU
/0/4                processor  CPU
/0/5                memory     System Memory
/0/5/0              memory     15GiB DIMM RAM
/0/5/1              memory     15GiB DIMM RAM
/0/6                memory     96KiB BIOS
/0/7                processor  CPU
/0/8                processor  CPU
/0/9                processor  CPU
/0/a                processor  CPU
/0/b                memory     System Memory
/0/c                memory
/0/d                memory
/0/100              bridge     440FX - 82441FX PMC [Natoma]
/0/100/1            bridge     82371SB PIIX3 ISA [Natoma/Triton II]
/0/100/1.1          storage    82371SB PIIX3 IDE [Natoma/Triton II]
/0/100/1.3          bridge     82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 ACPI
/0/100/2            display    GD 5446
/0/100/3            generic    Xen Platform Device
/1          eth0    network    Ethernet interface