The connections in red in the left half of the diagram correspond with the out-of-band appliance management network 192.168.4.0/24. These are physical Ethernet ports connected with Ethernet cables to the two internally interconnected Oracle Switch ES1-24 switches. All appliance components and their ILOMs have a reserved IP address in this network. Only one address is available for customer use: 192.168.4.254.

You may connect to this management Ethernet network by choosing one of these methods:

The connections in gold and blue on the left hand side of the diagram correspond with the default network vm_public_vlan. This is the standard VLAN-enabled network for virtual machine traffic with public access. The compute node connections are bonds of two Ethernet vNICs that terminate on port 1 of the I/O modules 4 and 5 in both Fabric Interconnects. The underlying physical connection consists of redundant InfiniBand cabling. The physical 10GbE ports of the Fabric Interconnects are connected for redundancy to two next-level data center switches.

The vNIC connections are distributed across the Fabric Interconnects and the I/O modules for maximum availability. If one of the redundant components fails at any level, be it an I/O module, an entire Fabric Interconnect or a next-level switch in the data center, the VMs always maintain an active external connection using either a blue or a red path. The uplinks to the data center switches are deliberately not cross-cabled to prevent that half of the compute nodes lose external connectivity if one of those switches fails.

All custom public networks follow the same principle as the default vm_public_vlan shown in this diagram. However, for the custom networks additional bonded vNICs are created on the compute nodes, and additional I/O ports must be configured and cabled.