The Oracle Ravello Build Day Live was our first event without a hardware product. That made travel easier for me as I didn’t need to bring the vBrownBag mobile lab to Israel. Instead, we used the cloud, also known as somebody else’s computer. This is a central part of the Ravello value, not needing to have your own equipment for every enterprise VM requirement. During the live stream, we migrated an enterprise application, Siebel call center, from an on-premises vSphere platform to the Ravello cloud platform. The migration was simply a matter of uploading the VMs; they did not need to be re-factored to run on the Ravello cloud. Even the networking was automatically configured to suit the existing, on-premises, VM configuration.
The second thing we showed live was the difference in performance when Ravello based VMs are run in different CPU modes. In 2017 we saw more public cloud vendors allow nested virtualization, which delivers hardware-assisted CPU virtualization. Ravello is also able to run their hypervisor (HVX) directly on bare metal within the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for even better performance. These high-performance options enable Ravello as a long-term production platform for workloads in the cloud.
You can find the playlist of the videos we made at Ravello here on YouTube.
One of the great things about doing this Build Day Live in Israel was that we had the Ravello developer team outside the office where we were recording. It took a little convincing to get some of them in front of the camera, but I really liked that we saw the inside of the product and the pride of the team that built Ravello. Jeffrey and I also got to see a bit of the startup culture in Israel, complete with X-Box and Foozeball table. We also learned to spend time in the break room, eating together is an important part of Israeli culture, as it is in much of the Middle East.
I enjoyed my brief visit to Israel, and I think that Ravello has an amazing product. If you need to run enterprise applications with public cloud economics, then Ravello is a great option.