Related: Try Oracle Infrastructure as a Serviceĭoing off-box virtualization is one way Oracle is replicating the best parts of the in-house data center experience-uncompromised hardware performance, in this case, and choice of virtualization tools-while still giving IT teams all of the flexibility of cloud computing, such as the ability to spin up capacity in minutes and pay only for what they use.Or it can use virtual machines for development and testing and then run production apps on Bare Metal, all in the same Oracle IaaS environment. So an IT organization built around VMware, KVM, or Xen can keep using those tools. Because that hypervisor runs off-box in a layered approach, it means an IT team can use any hypervisor it wants. Oracle also uses off-box virtualization in IaaS offerings other than Bare Metal Cloud, for organizations that want only a slice of a machine-say, just a one-core virtual machine. All of that administrative work happens “off box,” giving customers the full performance of today’s increasingly powerful hardware. Oracle, in contrast, offers the option of what it calls Bare Metal Cloud Service, in which the cloud-based server has no code from Oracle on it-no virtualization software and no software for billing or usage monitoring. With most cloud vendors, that server has virtualization software on it, so that the provider can carve that machine up to let several of its customers share it, as virtual machines. When an IT team buys IaaS compute capacity, it generally gets a slice of a server inside a cloud supplier’s data center. These are capabilities available in Oracle Cloud today.

Stay with me here-these sound in the weeds technically, but we’ll tie them directly to how they help established companies and government agencies move to the cloud in order to reduce or even eliminate their in-house data centers. Let’s make this real by digging into just two of the many IaaS technical decisions Oracle has made: off-box virtualization and account management of cloud resources.

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