Compute capacity is provided by an Oracle Private Cloud Appliance base rack, with a number of compute nodes selected to meet the requirements of the workloads it must host. A single system contains at least 2 and up to 20 compute nodes. As the customer requirements change over time, the subscription is adjusted and the 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.

At the heart of the system is a pair of management nodes, configured as an active/standby cluster for high availability. The active management node takes the shared virtual IP address and runs the Oracle VM Manager and related services, which are required for the configuration and management of the virtualization platform. The active management node also runs the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Controller Software, which is the system level management service. The Controller Software orchestrates compute node provisioning tasks from initial power-on to deployment readiness, and ensures the synchronization of essential configuration parameters between server nodes and across infrastructure components.

The core network infrastructure is a physical 100Gbit Ethernet fabric with built-in redundancy, designed around a leaf/spine topology. In this two-layer design, the leaf switches interconnect the rack hardware components, while the spine switches form the backbone of the network and perform routing tasks. Software defined networking (SDN) is implemented on top of the Ethernet fabric, providing dynamically allocated high-performance connectivity to physical components and virtual machines, while maintaining the traffic separation of hard-wired connections. Using VxLAN encapsulation and VLAN tagging, thousands of virtual networks can be deployed, providing segregated data exchange. Traffic can be internal between resources within the appliance environment, or external to network storage, applications, or other resources in the data center or on the internet. External connectivity is provided by redundant 10Gbit Ethernet uplinks to the next-level data center switches or top-of-rack (ToR) switches.

The Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS7-2 is installed inside the base rack. A small portion of the available disk space is reserved for use as a 'system disk' for the entire appliance, providing storage space for the Controller Software, Oracle VM Manager and system databases, software and firmware upgrade files, local package repositories, backups, and so on. The rest of the approximately 200TB can be configured as underlying storage for Oracle VM repositories, virtual appliances (assemblies/templates), virtual machine disks and application data. The storage resources are accessed through the dedicated internal storage network.