About Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform Architecture

Review this topic to understand how Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform works with Oracle Database Appliance hardware.

Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform provides virtualization technology that enables multiple isolated databases and applications to share the same physical server. The Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform ISO image is engineered specifically to leverage the Oracle Database Appliance hardware capabilities.

The Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform architecture uses the virtual machine components shown in the following illustration:

Figure 3-1 Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform Architecture

Description of Figure 3-1 follows
Description of "Figure 3-1 Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform Architecture"

  • Oracle Database Appliance Base Domain (ODA_BASE): A privileged virtual machine domain, specifically for databases, that provides database performance similar to bare metal deployments. A PCI pass-through driver provides ODA_BASE direct access to the shared storage.

  • Domain 0 (Dom0): Default domain that initiates Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform provisioning processes and hosts virtual machine templates. Most of the responsibility of hardware detection in an Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform environment is passed to the management domain, referred to as domain zero (or Dom0). On x86-based servers, the Dom0 kernel is actually a small-footprint Linux kernel with support for a broad array of devices, file systems, and software RAID and volume management. In Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform, Dom0 provides access to much of the system hardware, creating, deleting and controlling guest operating systems, and presenting those guests with a set of common virtual hardware.

  • Guest Domains (Domain U): Virtual machines that are provisioned to host non-database workloads, such as applications and middleware. Guest operating systems each have their own management domain, called a user domain, abbreviated to "Domain U". These domains are unprivileged domains that have no direct access to the hardware or to the device drivers. Each Domain U starts after Dom0 is running on Oracle Database Appliance Virtualized Platform.