We were looking into some of the VM images that we have. Some of them were very useful but we were wanting to host them in the cloud for the upcoming workshops.

Ravello is a cloud service that allow you to import and manage your VMs or stacks of VMs on public cloud. The interesting part of this is that the service can use our cloud infrastructure or a third party cloud. Ravello manages the costs but also adds simple capability to manage your VMs better.

Here’s a quick guide to putting VMs (I did a VirtualBox image but it can be any type) in the Oracle Cloud with Ravello.

LET’S GET YOUR IMAGE UP INTO THE CLOUD

The first thing that you can do is get access to Ravello. For the purposes of this article, we were using a Free Trial. You can start your trial today. There are some limits in terms of CPU hours but enough to get a sense of what its capable of. Let’s get started.

• Start Your Free Trial and register for a trial account.

• Login with your credentials. (I was working with Louis Lee in getting this going – thanks Louie).

• The following screen is the landing of Ravello. From here you can see your configured applications.

• On the left-hand side there a menu item called Library. The Library consists of blueprints (multiple VMs to create a single deployment), VM images and VM disks. Click on VMs in the menu.

• The Library consists of VM images and disks. It’s a repository of images. Click on the Import VM button.

• Clicking on the Import VM button, the page shows the different import tool options. We used different techniques to ensure that the VM starts.

• The operating-system that we used was Linux is have only the command-line-tool. There are command line tools for Mac and Windows. From what we saw as well, there is a Web-GUI tool for Windows as well. After the tool finishes uploading, it starts reviewing the configuration. It took about 1 hour for a 21GB file from Brisbane to the Ravello Cloud. NB: I had some initial issues with OVA files. However, what I did was to unzip the ova which contains the ovf file and the disks. Point the import client to the ovf file.

• The configuration settings can be updated before creating any new images or blueprints. Below pictures are from the VM image configuration that can be updated.

• After we created the image. The next step is to create an application from the image.

10. There’s a canvas that we use to build the application. There’s a single image for this application. At this stage, if we want to change or add any additional configuration changes to the image – we can do so here.

• After we configured the application it’s time to publish it. There are a couple of choices here – optimize for performance or optimize for cost. If we choose performance, we have control of the location. If we choose cost, then the application will be published in the best location based upon price. There is also an option to set how long the application is started. This is great for those demonstrations and we want it running for a short period of time.

• And now the application is started, there are additional views and configurations of the application. In the image below, we can see pricing and total consumed costs. We also have the ability to manage the running of the environment which is great for managing the costs and operations of the application.

• Here is another view of the VMs that are running in the application. If we use DHCP and / or dynamic naming of the VMs, then we can see the details here.

• And we can see the console of the VM as per on-premise.

• And here’s the console again of the VM which is up and running with its desktop.

So here you have it. We have the running VM in Ravello migrated from on-premise. There’s not much to do to get started. So go to http://www.ravellosystems.com and get a free trial.