If you are thinking about building  Oracle Linux or Oracle VM based systems for your Oracle databases, for example  building a private cloud type of system to consolidate your databases,. have you thought about the hardware  infrastructure  that your rest of platform will be built upon. One thing that you need to make sure is that the infrastructure stack is certified and validated for the software platform stack such as Oracle Linux/Oracle VM and the Oracle database.

The nice thing about this is that as a customer, you should not spend  your resources for this complex and time consuming certification and validation process  as various hardware vendors will partner with Oracle to establish the validated configurations. But you need to make sure that you select the proper infrastructure and OS  based on the validated configurations.  Since starting  working on Oracle Linux and Oracle VM in 2009 ,  it has been my team’s responsibility to work with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM team to certify  and validate  Infrastructure such as  Dell servers, storage and networking components  with Oracle VM and Oracle Linux Unbreakable Kernel (UEK). And we posted the validated configurations on Oracle Linux and Oracle VM  Validated Configuration (OVC) website : http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/linux/validated-configurations-085828.html .

This website documented pre-tested , validated configurations and best practices of running Oracle Linux and Oracle VM on various infrastructure  such as Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell Storage and Network. With each of the validated configuration, customers  can run their  production Oracle database either with  Oracle Linux or Oracle VM as a  database platform.

You can get a completed list of the configurations with this link: http://linux.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=102:1. On this link, you can type a Hardware vendor name and you can get a list of the validated configuration with various hardware. For example,. if you  type Dell to search, it will come back with  55 configurations as today (10/19/2016). The list consists of the latest servers such as Dell PowerEdge R930 and various Dell Storages.

This is what a specific configuration looks like: