By default running your Exalogic in a Virtual provides you with, what to Cloud Users, is a single large resource and they can just create vServers and not care about how they are laid down on the the underlying infrastructure. All the Cloud Users will know is that they can create vServers. For example if we have a Quarter Rack (8 Nodes) and our Cloud User creates 8 vServers those 8 vServers may run on 8 distinct nodes or may all run on the same node.

Although in many cases we, as Cloud Users, may not be to worried how the Virtualisation Algorithm decides where to place our vServers there are cases where it is extremely important that vServers run on distinct physical compute nodes. For example if we have a Weblogic Cluster we will want the Servers with in the cluster to run on distinct physical node to cover for the situation where one physical node is lost.

To achieve this the Exalogic Virtualised implementation provides Distribution Groups that define and anti-aliasing policy that the underlying Virtualisation Algorithm will take into account when placing vServers.

It should be noted that Distribution Groups must be created before you create vServers because a vServer can only be added to a Distribution Group at creation time.

Creating A Distribution Group

To create a Distribution Groups we will first need to select the Account in which we want the Distribution Group to be created. Once we have selected the account we will see the Interface update and Account specific Actions will be displayed within the Action Panes. From the Action pane (or Right-Click on the Account) select the "Create Distribution Group" action.

This will initiate the create wizard as follows.

Distribution Group Details

Within the first Step of the Wizard we can specify the name of the distribution group and this should be unique. In addition we can provide a detailed description of the group.

Distribution Group Configuration

The second step of the configuration wizard allows you to specify the number of elements that are required within this group and will specify a maximum of the number of nodes within you Exalogic. At this point it is always better to specify a group with spare capacity allowing for future expansion. As vServers are added to group the available slots decrease.

Summary

Finally the last step of the wizard display a summary of the information entered.