Oracle have merged Servers, Storage, and Switches together into the new Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance. Where-as traditional Appliance Vendors have to employ RedHat, Microsoft, or SuSE - the Oracle Appliance utilises its own Oracle VM Hypervisor and Oracle Enterprise Linux.

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance

The VCA has not been included in the 'EXA' line up, but is based upon the Oracle X3-2 server. The system starts with 2 base X3-2 nodes equipped with Intel Sandy Bridge E5 Xeon chips running at 2.2 GHz and 256 GB of main memory clocked at 1.6 GHz. Two 900 GB drives provide the nodes with storage, and a dual port 40 Gb Infiniband adaptor complete the specs. Although there is a 1 Gbps LAN port for Management at the back of each node.

You can expand from 2-25 nodes, and there are two more identical nodes in the rack for HA and to run Oracle's management software. Storage for the virtual machines running on the nodes is provided by ZFS 7320 which has 24 900 GB disks, with 12 disk in each RAID array then mirrored. You can scale the storage with further ZFS 7320 units, or 3rd party storage using iSCSI or NFS.

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance

For external networking there's a pair of Fabric Interconnect F1-15 I/O switches. There are enough Infiniband ports for scaling to 85 server nodes. But that kind of scale isn't supported - yet. 

Software within the VCA has Oracle VM included - Oracle's Hypervisor. As well as Oracle VM Manager, the utility for management and monitoring of the virtual machine images. Oracle have opted to use their new Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance Controller Software as opposed to the open source OpenStack or CloudStack cloud control software.

Support for Linux, Windows, and Solaris (x86) is there for the VCA.

Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance

Oracle promise power-on to production in about an hour, which we're quite impressed with if that is a deliverable promise. But then it should be for a 'turn key converged infrastructure solution'.

The Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance X3-2 is available now, for any more details please contact your BSI account manager or contact us.