Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System: Exalogic is not a general purpose system

Asset ID:	1-71-1460770.1
Update Date:	2012-09-04
Keywords:

Solution Type Technical Instruction Sure

Solution 1460770.1 : Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System: Exalogic is not a general purpose system

Applies to:

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2 Half Rack - Version Not Applicable and later
Information in this document applies to any platform.

Goal

Can an Engineered system, like Exalogic, be used by a customer for services like FTP, SMB, LDAP etc ?

Fix

Simple answer: NO - Exalogic is not a general purpose fileserver. Accessing or configuring ZFSSA for such services is not supported.

Long answer :

The ZFSSA inside the Exalogic configuration is for use exclusively by the Exalogic "system". It is not general-purpose storage.

What *is* supported: Installed applications or middleware (the binaries and install directories), OS images, Storage of VM templates and snapshots, log files, ACLs and other similar unstructured data generated by or used by the "system", Under-the-covers embedded databases used by the Exalogic system (Oracle VM, Exalogic Control, Linux/Solaris, OVAB, etc.) or applications (caches/dehydration stores, session or message persistence, backup copies of transient state, etc.)

There are only two means of accessing the integrated ZFSSA:

InfiniBand: This is the normal access method used by the system and by applications. Only software running on nodes directly attached to the InfiniBand fabric may access the storage directly.

This provides a high level of security - it is *technically impossible* for any entity in the datacenter to directly access the storage via the service network because the ZFSSA does not support Ethernet over IB Gigabit Ethernet

Gigabit Ethernet connections are used for three purposes only: Management, Network integration, Connectivity between sites for storage replication in the context of DR

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