With the exception of the embedded Oracle System Assistant USB flash drive (which is reserved for Oracle System Assistant) and the optional NVMe drives (located in the server front panel), you can install the operating system on any of the storage drives installed in the server. These include hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs).
For servers equipped with Fibre Channel (FC) PCIe host bus adapters (HBAs), 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 the 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. Do not overwrite this device when performing any of the following operations:
Operating system installations
Disk or partition formatting operations
General disk, partition, or filesystem maintenance
If 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 server's Oracle System Assistant USB flash drive, refer to the Oracle X5 Series Servers Administration Guide at http://www.oracle.com/goto/x86AdminDiag/docs.