Chapter 1 About Oracle Private Cloud Appliance

Table of Contents

This chapter provides a quick overview of the product and its components.

1.1 Introduction

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance 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 a few hours 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 Private Cloud Appliance 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 connect storage solutions from Oracle as well as third parties.

A list of supported operating systems is available in the release notes for the version of Oracle VM in use. All Oracle VM release notes are available at: https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualization/oracle-vm/index.html

Note

You must comply with all licensing requirements for OS images, other applications, and third-party hardware that you supply.

The latest version of the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Controller Software continues to support all earlier configurations of the hardware platform. Depending on the exact hardware configuration of your appliance, the physical network layer is either high-speed Ethernet or InfiniBand. In this documentation, both network architectures are described and referred to as either Ethernet-based or InfiniBand-based.

1.2 Components

The Oracle Private Cloud Appliance consists of an Oracle Rack Cabinet 1242 base, populated with the hardware components identified in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Components of an Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Rack
Figure showing the components installed in a fully populated base rack.

Table 1.1 Figure Legend

Item

Quantity

Description

A

2

Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS7-2 controller server

B

2

Oracle Server X8-2, used as management nodes

C

2-25

Oracle Server X8-2, used as virtualization compute nodes

(Due to the power requirements of the Oracle Server X8-2, if the appliance is equipped with 22kVA PDUs, the maximum number of compute nodes is 22. With 15KVA PDUs the maximum is 13 compute nodes.)

D

2

Cisco Nexus 9336C-FX2 Switch, used as leaf/data switches

E

1

Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS7-2 disk shelf

F

1

Cisco Nexus 9348GC-FXP Switch

G

2

Cisco Nexus 9336C-FX2 Switch, used as spine switches


At the software level, Oracle Private Cloud Appliance leverages the virtualization technology of Oracle VM and Oracle Software Defined Networking. Management, including updates, of the underlying hardware and software is orchestrated and largely automated by the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance controller software.

Support for Previous Generations of Hardware Components

The latest version of the Oracle Private Cloud Appliance Controller Software continues to support all earlier configurations of the hardware platform. These may include the following components:

Table 1.2 Supported Hardware

Component Type

Component Name and Minimum PCA Software Version

Management Nodes

  • Oracle Server X5-2 (release 2.0.3 or newer)

  • Sun Server X4-2 (release 1.1.3 or newer)

  • Sun Server X3-2 (since initial release)

Compute Nodes

  • Oracle Server X7-2 (release 2.3.2 or newer)

  • Oracle Server X6-2 (release 2.2.1 or newer)

  • Oracle Server X5-2 (release 2.0.3 or newer)

  • Sun Server X4-2 (release 1.1.3 or newer)

  • Sun Server X3-2 (since initial release)

Storage Appliance

  • Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS5-ES (release 2.3.3 or newer)

  • Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS3-ES (release 1.1.3 or newer)

  • Sun ZFS Storage Appliance 7320 (since initial release)

InfiniBand Network Hardware

  • Oracle Fabric Interconnect F1-15 (since initial release)

  • NM2-36P Sun Datacenter InfiniBand Expansion Switch (since initial release)

Internal Management Switch

  • Oracle Switch ES1-24 (since initial release)


Copyright © 2013, 2022, Oracle and/or its affiliates.