Oracle Private Cloud Appliance (PCA) is an Oracle Engineered System designed for virtualization. It is an offering that industry analysts refer to as a Converged Infrastructure Appliance: an infrastructure solution in the form of a hardware appliance that comes from the factory pre-configured. Compute resources, network hardware, storage providers, operating systems and applications are engineered to work together but are managed and operated as a single unit.

Installation, configuration, high availability, expansion and upgrading are automated and orchestrated as much as possible. The minimum configuration consists of a base rack with infrastructure components, a pair of management nodes, and two compute nodes. This configuration can be extended by one compute node at a time. All rack units, whether populated or not, are pre-cabled and pre-configured at the factory in order to facilitate the installation of expansion compute nodes on-site at a later time. Within approximately one hour after power-on, the appliance is ready to create virtual servers. Virtual servers are commonly deployed from Oracle VM templates (individual pre-configured VMs) and assemblies (interconnected groups of pre-configured VMs).

The primary value proposition of Oracle PCA is the integration of components and resources for the purpose of ease of use and rapid deployment. It should be considered a general purpose solution in the sense that it supports the widest variety of operating systems, including Windows, and any application they might host. Customers can attach their existing storage or provide storage solutions from Oracle or third parties.