With the exception of the embedded Oracle System Assistant USB flash drive (which is reserved for Oracle System Assistant) and the optional NVM Express drives on the server front panel, you can install the software on any of the storage drives installed in the server. Hard disk drives (HDDs), solid state drives (SSDs), and RAID volumes are valid installation targets for Oracle VM Server.
For servers equipped with a Fibre Channel PCIe host bus adapter (HBA), you can choose to install the operating system to an external Fibre Channel storage device.
The server ships with an embedded Oracle System Assistant USB flash drive. This drive contains Oracle System Assistant, device drivers, and firmware for Oracle ILOM, BIOS, and supported IO devices. During the installation of all supported operating systems, this USB flash drive is detected as a SCSI disk with a single partition that is read/write capable and is displayed as Oracle_SSM in the list of drives. You should be careful not to overwrite this device when performing any of the following operations:
Operating system installations
Disk or partition formatting operations
General disk, partition or file system maintenance
In the event that this USB flash drive is overwritten, the original contents can be restored. To restore the contents of the USB flash drive, obtain the Oracle System Assistant recovery and ISO update image and use it to perform a restore operation.
For instructions for downloading the Oracle System Assistant recovery and ISO update image and restoring the Oracle System Assistant flash drive, refer to the Oracle X5 Series Servers Administration Guide at http://www.oracle.com/goto/x86AdminDiag/docs.