Oracle enters the pre-integrated systems market with the Virtual Compute Appliance-- a virtualised x86 server stack in a box complete with SDN software promising rapid and repeatable virtual infrastructure deployment.
The Virtual Compute Appliance ships fully assembled and is based on the Oracle X3-2 servers. It includes two 8-core Intel Sandy Bridge-EP Xeon E5 processors running at 2.2GHz.
The base rack runs the virtual stack on 2 server nodes, with 2 nodes handling virtualisation management software. Customers can easily add further nodes (up to 25 per rack), with the system automatically detecting and configuring new additions.
Each node carries 256GB of 1.6GHz memory, two mirrored 900GB HDDs and a dual-port 40GBps InfiniBand adapter card.
The base system includes an Oracle ZFS 7320 storage appliance hosting the management environment. Customers can add an additional storage array in the shape of another ZFS appliance or a 3rd party iSCSI or NFS system.
Also included in the appliance are a pair of Fabric Interconnect F1-15 I/O director switches (from 2012 Oracle acquisition Xsigo Systems) with sixteen 10GBps ethernet ports handling "north-south" traffic.
Preinstalled software includes Oracle VM, VM Manager and Xsigo SDN software.
The Virtual Compute Appliance should start shipping from September 2013.