Ravello Systems, a Palo Alto based virtualization software company that was founded by the same team that created the KVM hypervisor, has showcased a large scale nested VMware vSphere deployment running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). By illustrating how to set up a large scale, 250-node VMware ESXi data center on AWS, Ravello has demonstrated how enterprises can use the public cloud for upgrade testing their VMware vSphere environments.
Ravello Systems, founded in 2011 has developed HVX, which wraps complex application environments in self-contained capsules that can run on any cloud. Delivered as a service, Ravello enables entire application environments with existing VMware or KVM virtual machines and complex networking, to be deployed on any cloud, without any changes.
In addition to seamless cloud usage, Ravello has enabled enterprises to reduce provisioning time for complex application environments from months to minutes. A case in point is online gaming leader 888 Holdings that has a large VMware data center and a complex application environment with hundreds of VMware virtual machines. Thanks to Ravello, 888 would seamlessly use AWS cloud for its test environments and have reduced provisioning time from several weeks to 15 minutes.
Ravello Systems further enhanced its technology in April 2015 by implementing hardware extensions such as Intel VT and AMD SVM that allow the KVM and VMware ESXi hypervisors to run nested on AWS or Google Cloud. This offering significantly helps the VMware customer base and ecosystem by enabling multi-node VMware ESXi lab environments on demand – for development, testing, training, demos, proofs of concept and evaluations.
