Thought Leadership

Oracle Ravello End of Life: Hey You, Get Off Ravello and Onto Our Cloud!

Annie Reiss

Nov 21, 2019 - 3 min read

When I first heard the news about the sinking of Ravello, the Rolling Stones hit, Get Off of My Cloud, popped into my head. It just seemed appropriate. Perhaps this happened to you as well? Regardless, if your business has been rocked by a dying cloud, you know you need to get off — now.

What happened to Oracle Ravello labs?

When Oracle acquired Ravello Systems to grow its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) efforts during 2016, it hoped to enable customers to run any workload in the cloud, no matter the use case. With all the available resources, hopes and dreams ran big. Unfortunately, performance didn’t always meet expectations and Ravello users suffered some pretty painful experiences at times.

Now here we are three years and $500 million later. The toast has hit the floor, marmalade-side-down, so to speak.

It’s been reported that Oracle has laid off half its employees at its Ravello development center and customers have received letters which announced product end of life for May 2020. Those in the industry who hoped VMware would purchase Ravello and use the IP as a foundation of multi-cloud VM management are reeling from these old wounds again. Any speculation is over. Customers are in a difficult situation that is poised to become worse.

Oracle Ravello End of Life

With Ravello’s end of life come all kinds of “ailments” managers don’t really want: lack of support, few or no security fixes or critical bug resolutions, higher operating costs, etc. On top of that, Ravello has notified customers they are shutting off their complimentary access to the vExperts community at the end of this September.

You’re likely exploring the best Ravello alternative to meet your needs – and we are here to help.

The best is yet to come: Ravello vs CloudShare

As you start looking at options for a new cloud provider after Oracle Ravello announcing its end of life, we believe you’ll find there are better-suited solutions out there for you. They might not be from a vendor as big as Oracle, but you’ve seen for yourself what that gets you.

Using Ravello for self-paced or virtual training labs, sales demos and POCs or sandboxing environments?

Having been in this business for a decade, supporting top-tier customers, most of which run pretty complex environments, I know the following three pointers are critical to the success of cloud-based virtual IT labs.

1. If you are considering moving to one of the Big Four public cloud providers, before you bet on another huge vendor, consider your software architecture. In the case it involves complex networking or requires nested virtualization, it won’t be easily supported by the commodity clouds. They simply do not support many advanced networking features, meaning you’ll have to re-architect your solution.

So, whether you are looking for a different infrastructure to support your cybersecurity training or leveraging the cloud for other types of applications and use cases, make sure the networking features you need are fully supported.

2. Single cloud providers don’t cut it any more. We’ve talked before about the need for specialized cloud providers and a multi-cloud strategy. David Linthicum, chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte says, “When a company leverages a multi-cloud environment, typically they’re best-of-breed focused.”

I would add that in addition to making sure your cloud provides best-of-breed storage, CPUs and other infrastructure, it should fulfill your business needs. Look for clouds that enable you to optimize workflows and offer features and automation to help your people do their jobs without involving IT resources.

If your business goals are to use the cloud for virtual training, sales demos and POCs, support or QA, make sure your chosen cloud provides capabilities that let your users get their jobs done intuitively and efficiently, and that you’ll have analytics that enable managers to evaluate effectiveness.

3. If your main concern is about budget, don’t worry. Look for a cloud that provides cost-saving resource management and governance features, including auto-suspend and auto-delete that make sure you don’t end up paying for inactive machines. In fact, CloudShare is so confident that you will love our solution – which comes with built-in cost-saving features.

If you remember these three points, I’m confident you’ll soon find a Ravello replacement that performs better, more reliably and offers features that’ll actually accelerate your business. So, say good-bye to your old toast and move to something more appealing.

And if power and productivity are your jam, get on to our cloud!