1 Introduction to the Oracle PCA Plug-in

This chapter provides a general overview of the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance (PCA) plug-in, including supported hardware and software.

The following topics are discussed:

• About the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance

• About the Oracle Virtualization Plug-in

• Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Features

• Supported Hardware

• Supported Software

1.1 About the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance (PCA) is an integrated, "wire once," software-defined converged infrastructure system designed for rapid deployment of private cloud at industry-leading price point.

The Oracle PCA supports a large range of mixed workloads hosted in a converged server, network, and storage environment to enable general purpose, business-, and mission-critical application deployments in medium-to-large data centers.

With Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c, the Private Cloud Appliance is transformed into a powerful Cloud Services delivery platform and provides a simple path from on-premise to Oracle Cloud.

1.2 About the Oracle Virtualization Plug-in

The Enterprise Manager for Oracle Virtualization (VT) plug-in has been extended to support monitoring and management of the Oracle PCA Racks by Enterprise Manager. Through Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, you can monitor the various hardware components of the Oracle PCA rack (such as compute nodes, InfiniBand switches, and so forth).

1.3 Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Features

Features
"Turnkey" converged infrastructure solution automates hardware and software deployment with Oracle Private Cloud Appliance controller software.
Easy private cloud deployment ranging from IaaS to DBaaS by adding Oracle Enterprise Manager 13c.
Support for Oracle VM Templates enables deployment of ready-to-run VMs containing applications in minutes or hours, not days.
Oracle SDN software reduces operational complexity by enabling software-defined infrastructure in a "wire-once" system.
Saving hundreds of hours of installation and configuration time.
Faster Time-to-Market at industry-leading price point.
Reduced risks by running Microsoft Windows, Linux and Oracle Solaris workloads on one system.
Efficient Oracle software licensing based on what you use, not on the system's total capacity.
Lowered acquisition, deployment and operational costs.
Innovative converged infrastructure solution from a single vendor allows for superior ease-of-purchase, product integration, simplified management and single point of contact for support.

1.4 Supported Hardware

You can use the Oracle VT plug-in to monitor the performance of a wide variety of Oracle PCA targets, including:

• Base rack. The Oracle PCA is composed of the following components:

  • 2 to 25 compute nodes.

  • 2 management nodes.

  • 2 NM2-36 Sun InfiniBand Switches.

  • 2 ES1-24 Ethernet switches.

  • 2 Fabric Interconnect switches.

  • 1 Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS3-ES.

• Compute nodes. The base rack can support a maximum of 25 compute nodes. The base rack supports mixing of compute nodes from the following Oracle Servers:

  • X5-2.

  • X4-2.

  • X3-2.

• Virtual networking. Each Private Cloud Appliance hardware configuration contains the following multiple redundant components that serve as gateways to the data center's Ethernet network:

  • QDR InfiniBand switches.

  • Oracle Fabric Interconnect systems.

• Integrated storage. Oracle Private Cloud Appliance features a fully integrated, enterprise-grade Oracle ZFS Storage ZS3-ES for centrally storing the management environment as well as providing data storage for VMs.

  The storage capacity of Private Cloud Appliance can be expanded beyond the internal, included storage, to external data center racks containing Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance or supported storage available from other storage vendors.

1.5 Supported Software

The following software, included with the Private Cloud Appliance, enable scalability, software-defined virtual networking, and GUI-based management:

• Oracle VM. Oracle VM application-driven server virtualization is designed to be highly scalable and built to enable rapid application deployment. Oracle VM supports up to 128 vCPUs and a variety of guest OSes such as Linux, Oracle Solaris, and Microsoft Windows. Oracle VM is also optimized to accelerate applications deployments.

• Oracle SDN software: Oracle SDN dynamically connects servers to networks and storage. It eliminates the physical storage and networking cards found in every server and replaces them with virtual network interface cards (vNICs) and virtual host bus adapters (vHBAs) that can be deployed on the fly. Applications and operating systems see these virtual resources exactly as they would see their physical counterparts. Oracle Virtual Networking simplifies complex data center deployments with a wire-once solution and simple software-defined network configurations.

• Oracle Private Cloud Appliance controller software: The controller software allows users to manage and monitor the systems hardware, perform software upgrades, create and manage virtual resources (virtual servers, virtual networks, and storage), and monitor utilization of all system resources in real-time. The controller software runs on two dedicated management nodes that are configured for high availability with automatic failover in the event of a failure. It is accessible via a GUI dashboard

1.6 Prerequisites

Ensure that the following prerequisites have been met before continuing:

• The Oracle Private Cloud Appliance (PCA) controller software should be version 2.1.1 or later.

• The ILOM version of the management nodes, compute nodes, InfiniBand switches and Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance should be version 3.1 or later.

• The agent needs to be installed on shared storage according to instructions, so that failover capability can be utilized. See Installing the Management Agent on Oracle PCA for details.