This is the first in a series of posts that will showcase the kind of use cases that are achievable using VCN peering for both the Ravello and OCI platforms.
If you reading this you are likely familiar with Ravello and either us it through something like the vExpert program, are on a trial or are a paying customer.
While Ravello has so awesome flexibility it is missing the odd feature you would expect from a Public Cloud service. For example, file and object storage, database services, private network connectivity to you workloads etc.
Now that Ravello is part of the Oracle portfolio it wouldn’t make sense to build out those services as part of Ravello when they exist in OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastucre). It makes much more sense to give Ravello access to such services.
Using a capability called VCN peering you are able to link a Ravello application to an OCI VCN (Virtual Cloud Network) allowing for those services in OCI to be available in that Ravello app. I’m not going to show you how to create a VCN peer here but follow the guide here.
OCI File Storage Services:
One of the cool things that OCI has is the File Storage Service. Previously in Ravello if you wanted to present a some file storage you would have needed to create a NAS server in the application itself. Now we can present the file storage through the VCN peering connection. This as the added advantage of not being unique to the Ravello application, which means that a file saved to the file share in Ravello can be available to either other Ravello applications OR to other OCI resources.
To create a File System follow these instructions. After this you will have a private IP which is accessible to Ravello through the VCN peer.
And for Ravello this is great, as it means things like backups can be accessed even if the Ravello application is deleted.
The Veeam Lab Architecture:
I have a VMware lab running in Ravello with 4 x vSphere 6.7 host, 1 x VCSA appliance and 1 x Veeam Backup and Replication Server. I have linked my Ravello application to a VCN in an OCI tenancy (this can be any OCI tenancy with a region) using VCN Local Peering, and created a file system in OCI. (this assumes you have already created the VCN network and build your subnets, see the getting started seciton in OCI for help to do this.)
Once you have the initnal setup complete you need to add the NAS as a backup repository in Veeam B&R.
When you setup your backup job select the shared folder option.
Depending on the options you selected when you create the file share you will see 100GB of storage space.
Once you have done the above you can now run the job and have the backup files stored in a enterprise grade and scale public cloud file store.
