The Oracle VM Manager Web User Interface is provided without any software limitation to its functionality. Once your appliance has been provisioned, the Oracle VM environment is fully configured and ready to use for the deployment and management of your virtual machines. In this section, the operations that are explicitly not permitted, are presented as guidelines and limitations that should be followed when working within Oracle VM Manager, or executing operations programmatically through the command line interface (CLI) or web services API (WSAPI).
The following actions must not be performed, except if Oracle gives specific instructions to do so.
Do Not:
attempt to discover, remove, rename or otherwise modify servers or their configuration;
attempt to modify the NTP configuration of any server;
attempt to add, remove, rename or otherwise modify server pools or tenant groups, or their configuration;
attempt to change the configuration of server pools corresponding with tenant groups configured through the appliance controller software (except for DRS policy setting);
attempt to move servers out of the existing server pools or tenant groups;
attempt to add or modify or remove server processor compatibility groups;
attempt to modify or remove the existing local disk repositories or the repository named Rack1-Repository;
attempt to delete or modify any of the preconfigured default networks, or custom networks configured through the appliance controller software;
attempt to connect virtual machines to the appliance management network;
attempt to modify or delete any existing Storage elements that are already configured within Oracle VM, or use the reserved names of the default storage elements – for example
OVCA_ZFSSA_Rack1– for any other configuration;attempt to configure global settings, such as YUM Update, in the Reports and Resources tab (except for tags, which are safe to edit);
attempt to select a non-English character set or language for the operating system, because this is not supported by Oracle VM Manager – see support note with Doc ID 2519818.1;
attempt to connect any Oracle Private Cloud Appliance component to a customer's LDAP or Active Directory for authentication, including management nodes, compute nodes, or ZFS storage appliances;
attempt to add users – for example – adding users to management nodes or to WebLogic;
attempt to change DNS settings on compute nodes or ZFS storage appliances. The Oracle Private Cloud Appliance dashboard contains the only permitted DNS settings.
If you ignore this advice, the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance automation, which uses specific naming conventions to label and manage assets, may fail. Out-of-band configuration changes would not be known to the orchestration software of the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance. If a conflict between the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance configuration and Oracle VM configuration occurs, it may not be possible to recover without data loss or system downtime.
An exception to these guidelines applies to the creation of a Service VM. This is a VM created specifically to perform administrative operations, for which it needs to be connected to both the public network and internal appliance networks. For detailed information and instructions, refer to the support note with Doc ID 2017593.1.
There is a known issue with the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Upgrader, which stops the upgrade process if Service VMs are present. For the appropriate workaround, consult the support note with Doc ID 2510822.1.
Regardless of which interface you use to access the Oracle VM functionality directly, the same restrictions apply. In summary, you may use the Web UI, CLI or WSAPI for the operations listed below.
Use the Oracle VM Interfaces for:
configuration and management of VM networks, VLAN interfaces and VLANs;
configuration of VM vNICs and connecting VMs to networks;
all VM configuration and life cycle management;
attaching and managing external storage for VM usage;
compute node IPMI control.
You can find the complete Oracle VM documentation library at this URL: https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualization/oracle-vm/index.html.
It is critical that you understand the scope of Oracle VM within the specific context of Oracle Private Cloud Appliance. A major objective of the appliance is to orchestrate or fully automate a number of Oracle VM operations. It also imposes restrictions that do not exist in other Oracle VM environments, on infrastructure aspects such as server hardware, networking and storage configuration. Consequently, some chapters or even entire books in the Oracle VM documentation library are irrelevant to Oracle Private Cloud Appliance customers, or should not be used because they describe procedures that conflict with the way the appliance controller software configures and manages the Oracle VM infrastructure.
This list, which is not meant to be exhaustive, explains which parts of the Oracle VM documentation should not be referenced because the functionality in question is either not supported or managed at the level of the appliance controller software:
Installation and Upgrade Guide
Oracle Private Cloud Appliance always contains a clustered pair of management nodes with Oracle VM Manager pre-installed. When you power on the appliance for the first time, the compute node provisioning process begins, and one of the provisioning steps is to install Oracle VM Server on the compute nodes installed in the appliance rack. The installation of additional compute nodes and upgrades of the appliance software are orchestrated in a similar way.
Getting Started Guide
Although the getting started guide is an excellent way to progress through the entire chain of operations from discovering the first Oracle VM Server to the point of accessing a fully operational virtual machine, it does not help the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance user, who only needs Oracle VM Manager in order to create and manage virtual machines.
Administration Guide
This guide describes a number of advanced system administration tasks, most of which are performed at the level of the virtualization platform. The information in this book may be useful for specific configurations or environments, but we recommend that you consult with Oracle subject matter experts to avoid making changes that adversely affect the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance environment.
Command Line Interface and Web Services API
The recommended interface to manage the Oracle VM environment within Oracle Private Cloud Appliance is the Oracle VM Manager Web UI. The CLI and WSAPI should be used with care, within the limitations described in the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance documentation. They can be safely used in a programmatic context, for example to automate operations related to the virtual machine life cycle (which includes create, clone, start, stop, migrate VMs, pinning CPUs, uploading templates and ISOs, and so on).
Since Oracle VM Manager is the preferred interface to manage the virtualized environment, this chapter provides links to various sections of the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide in order to help Oracle Private Cloud Appliance users perform the necessary tasks. The book is closely aligned with the structure of the Web UI it describes, and the sections and links in this chapter conveniently follow the same basic outline. Where the Oracle VM Manager functionality overlaps with the default Oracle Private Cloud Appliance configuration the document indicates which operations are safe and which should be avoided.