This book details conceptual, topology and configuration topics about Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder. This Preface includes the following topics:
The intended audience is system administrators who will use Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder for their organizations.
This release of Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder contains the following new features or product enhancements:
The introduction of a standalone Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Deployer, a Web application that maintains a repository of assembly archives created by Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio. Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Deployer provides operations for registering these assembly archives to virtualized systems such as Oracle VM and provides operations for orchestrating the deployment of the software system defined by the assembly archive.
Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Deployer includes a Web service API for use in creating custom applications that leverage Oracle Exalogic. The Web service API provides operations for uploading assembly archives, registering the assembly archive virtualization system and managing assembly instances for the system defined in the assembly archive. See Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Developer's Guide.
It also includes the abctl command line interface that is built on top of the same Web Service API and provides all the same operations.
Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Deployer provides role based access control where all assembly operations are authenticated and authorized.
Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder now supports deployment of assemblies to:
Oracle VM 3.0, and
Oracle Exalogic
Support for assembly archives as open virtualization archives (OVA). An assembly archive contains one or more VM images, and a metadata file (OVF) describing how they are associated with one another.
Multiple network interfaces support: Appliances can now have multiple network interfaces defined and input endpoints can be selectively bound to a specific network interface or any.
Multiple virtual network (Vnet) support: You can now define multiple virtual networks (Vnets) for an assembly and have appliances' network interfaces bound to different Vnets.
Shared storage support: You can configure appliance's file sets as shared or local. If supported by the underlying deployment platform, you can specify that file sets be shared with individual appliances within assemblies. Shared storage devices in the deployment platform can be populated with the contents of the shared file sets as part of assembly deployment.
Extended files ownership support: Within an appliance, files ownership permissions (operating system user and group) can now be defined at each file set level.
Zero-count appliances: Ability to initially deploy an appliance within an assembly with zero appliance instances which will cause no VM instance for that appliance to be created. In subsequent scaling operations you could add appliance instances to those appliances that are part of the assembly configuration but were initially "deployed" with a zero-instance count.
Custom appliance properties: Ability to add custom properties to an appliance that can be edited along with appliance's pre-defined properties during assembly editing and as part of deployment plan. With this feature you can configure, and/or operate a custom product or component that gets deployed with an Oracle product in an appliance.
Anti-affinity support: You can specify the requirement to place multiple instances of a particular appliance across different physical hosts in the deployment target.
Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder now supports the introspection and deployment of the following additional products:
Oracle SOA: Examines an existing SOA WebLogic Server deployment, capturing all the configuration in the SOA domain as well as the container configuration and deployed composites in MDS.
Oracle Service Bus: Examines and captures an Oracle WebLogic Server domain where Oracle Service Bus is configured with or without Oracle SOA.
Oracle Tuxedo: Examines and captures a single or multiple-machine Oracle Tuxedo domain, and the Oracle Home Directory that it resides on (including add-ons).
Oracle Traffic Director: Examines and captures a collection of configurable elements (metadata) that determine the run-time behavior of an Oracle Traffic Director instance.
Oracle RAC Database: Examines Oracle Clusterware and RAC Database components and captures their metadata.
A Generic Appliance: Ability to create and deploy an opaque, standalone, and self-contained product or application as an appliance for which Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder does not have in-built support.
External Appliances: a virtual machine template created outside of Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder and compatible with deployment on Oracle VM 3.0 can be imported into a Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder catalog as an external appliance. Once imported, external appliances can be edited, added and deployed as part of any assembly.
A revised, more streamlined Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio graphical user interface with an IDE look and feel. This includes a Structure Pane displaying the contents of Assemblies, Appliances and Deployments, a Deployment navigator, a broken out Deployment Plan navigator, as well as drag and drop support for registration and deployment.
Integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio supports browsing, upload and download of assembly archives to/from Oracle Enterprise Manager Software Library.
Flexible installation options: Allows you to install and configure the functionality you want. You can choose to install and configure just the Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Studio, or just the Deployer or both on the same machine or different machines.
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For more information, see the following documents in the documentation set:
Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder Developer's Guide
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