Ravello Systems
Removing Migration Barriers

The efficient adoption of leading public clouds is increasingly becoming a must-have for enterprises.“However,businesses quickly realize that there is a huge complexity in re-creating their enterprise application environments in other clouds, especially in public cloud infrastructureslikes AWS,” notes Rami Tamir, CEO & Co-founder, Ravello Systems. Headquartered inPalo Alto, CA, Ravello Systems was founded with a vision to solve this challenge. The company is driving a fundamental shift in economics for enterprises by enabling the use of any leading cloud of their choice and also changing the way companies consume the public cloud byusing an innovative approach called nested virtualization which breaks down technical barriers with speed and simplicity.

Ravello helps enterprises achieve the perfect balance of private and public cloud resources by running their applications in any cloud without any VM conversion or migration overhead. To achieve this, the company has been adding new capabilities on a monthly basis. For instance, Ravello can run VMware or KVM virtual machines unmodified on AWS or Google Cloud in addition to the company’s recent launch—a Direct Upload feature, enabling upload of virtual machines directly from vCenter. With the rising demand for infrastructures that normalizes the public cloud and the data centre from the application’s perspective, the company has developed a nested virtualization solution that enables an enterprise to completely encapsulate a multi-VM application and run it on the cloud. “In addition to existing virtual environments, we also have the unique ability to run other hypervisors such as KVM on top of AWS or Google Cloud,” Tamir explains. This opens up a host of new use cases such as hypervisor labs, multi-node OpenStack labs and Android emulators, with full hardware acceleration running on AWS.

Ravello has essentially built a high performance nested hypervisor, HVX that is designed to run in the cloud. Along with HVX, it has also built software defined networking that allows the network configurations to remain identical to the data centre.

We have the unique ability to run any existing virtual environment as well as other hypervisors in the public cloud

This enables customers to run entire VMware workloads unmodified in the public cloud and spin up dev/test environments on demand.“We have abstracted away the differences in various clouds so that the same application environment can be spun up within a short period of time. It’s an outstanding achievement to deliver such a complex technology in the form of an easy-to-use SaaS,” explains Tamir.

Ravello has worked aggressively to benefit its customers. For instance, a gaming company required a complex application environment consisting of 278 virtual machines with over 20 different virtual applications, multiple subnets, static IP’s and other dependencies running on VMware. The company often needed to recreate the environment for testing and it usually took them 3 months to provision their environment even after they had the hardware ready. Engaging with Ravello, the company now has a blue print of their applications in Ravello and it only takes 15 minutes to spin up an instance of their application in AWS.

In the coming years, the company envisions a world where enterprises truly have access to unlimited infrastructure. Ravello will continue to introduce innovative software solutions to enable enterprises to reduce their time to provision application environments from months to minutes and will eliminate the customer’s capacity constraints forever. “The advantage of delivering our product as SaaS is that we can move really fast and bring new features to customers every few weeks,” Tamir concludes.