Announcing Exadata System Software 26ai, release 26.1!

We’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of Exadata System Software 26ai!

Exadata System Software 26ai (release 26.1) introduces some of the most significant advancements ever delivered for Exadata, redefining how organizations run Oracle Database workloads at enterprise scale with greater availability, agility, performance, resilience, improved infrastructure utilization, and lower operational costs.

Headlining the release is the world’s first live migration for RDMA-enabled database virtual machines, a breakthrough capability that enables extreme performance during infrastructure maintenance and workload rebalancing. Exadata System Software 26ai also expands Exascale storage capabilities, strengthens observability and operational control, and introduces major new optimizations for AI, OLTP, analytics, and highly consolidated database environments.

Together, these innovations further extend Exadata’s leadership for mission-critical Oracle Database infrastructure, helping customers reduce operational disruption and infrastructure costs, improve deployment flexibility, and accelerate demanding AI and database workloads at enterprise scale.

In this post, we’ll cover:

• Higher availability and agility with Exadata VM Live Migration
• Extreme performance optimizations with XRMEM, Flash, and I/O Resource Management
• New Exascale innovations for storage tiering and isolation, snapshots, and resource profiles
• Stronger security, superior manageability and flexibility, and increased observability

World’s first RDMA-enabled database virtual machine live migration

This capability builds on the Exascale architecture introduced with Exadata X10M. By leveraging shared Exascale volumes for VM filesystems (e.g. /boot, /etc, /var, database and GI homes etc.) rather than locally attached storage in the database servers for VM image files, X10M and newer database servers can each host up to 50 VMs . Higher VM density allows organizations to consolidate more databases onto fewer systems while simplifying infrastructure management. As a result, database VMs can move between physical hosts without moving the underlying data, making large-scale VM mobility practical for highly consolidated database environments.

The unique result is greater availability and operational agility for RDMA-enabled databases across the Exadata infrastructure stack. Customers can keep database VMs online during planned maintenance operations, including hardware replacement, firmware updates, and operating system patching, while also dynamically rebalancing workloads to maximize infrastructure utilization. Maintenance operations can now occur with significantly less disruption across consolidated database environments. Combined with Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), Exadata VM Live Migration further expands coverage for planned maintenance events of the KVM host while increasing flexibility across consolidated database deployments.

Extreme performance optimizations

Exadata System Software 26ai introduces major performance enhancements across Exadata Smart Flash Cache, Exadata RDMA Memory (XRMEM), I/O Resource Management (IORM), and intelligent Flash Cache recovery. Together, these enhancements improve performance consistency, reduce latency, and accelerate AI, OLTP, analytics, and highly consolidated database workloads.

Exadata Smart Flash Cache optimizations

Exadata Smart Flash Cache reduces latency for critical workloads by accelerating database reads and writes through high performance flash storage.

In Exadata System Software 26ai, Smart Flash Cache can now take advantage of unused flash capacity by automatically and transparently writing data directly to flash when cache utilization is low. This enhancement effectively delivers an all-flash experience for workloads that fit within available Flash Cache capacity, accelerating both data loads and query performance. This capability allows demanding workloads to benefit from flash acceleration without requiring dedicated all-flash storage configurations.

As Flash Cache utilization increases, Exadata automatically transitions writes to underlying storage while continuing to optimize Flash Cache placement and allocation policies transparently.

These enhancements significantly improve performance for workloads that fit entirely within Flash Cache. RMAN restores can complete up to 1.5X faster, while Exascale volumes fully resident in Flash Cache can achieve up to 1.6X lower write latency.

Exascale snapshot caching optimizations in Exadata RDMA Memory

Exascale snapshots and thin clones enable customers to rapidly create space-efficient database copies for development, testing, analytics, and AI workloads, dramatically reducing provisioning time and storage consumption while allowing these environments to scale efficiently without proportional increases in storage requirements.

To accelerate performance of snapshot-based workloads, Exadata automatically caches snapshot and clone data in Exadata Smart Flash Cache and Exadata RDMA Memory (XRMEM), significantly reducing read latency.

Exadata System Software 26ai further optimizes XRMEM management for snapshot and clone workloads, increasing the amount of snapshot-related data that can be cached in XRMEM and improving the efficiency of RDMA-based snapshot access.

These enhancements allow more snapshot and clone data to be served directly from XRMEM, further reducing latency for snapshot-based workloads.

Delivering high I/O performance after storage server maintenance

Exadata System Software 26ai extends the intelligent post-maintenance Flash Cache recovery capabilities introduced in Exadata System Software 25.2 to support all Oracle AI Database 26ai workloads running on both ASM and Exascale.

When a storage server comes back online after planned or unplanned downtime, Exadata can intelligently retrieve data from the Flash Cache of partner storage servers while local Flash Cache is rewarmed and resynchronized. Because remote flash access is significantly faster than reading from local disk, Exadata maintains consistently high I/O performance during and after maintenance operations. In Exascale, storage servers coming back online can proactively repopulate Flash Cache by identifying hot data from partner storage servers. This occurs alongside normal workload-driven repopulation, accelerating Flash Cache recovery after maintenance events.

This capability helps maintain consistent performance for mission-critical OLTP, analytics, and AI workloads during planned storage infrastructure maintenance by accelerating recovery of flash-resident working sets across large, consolidated environments.

Cluster-aware Exadata Smart Flash Cache and XRMEM management

This release introduces cluster-aware management for Exadata Smart Flash Cache and Exadata RDMA Memory (XRMEM) using Oracle Grid Infrastructure (GI) cluster plans. Administrators can now define Flash Cache and XRMEM allocations at the GI cluster level rather than managing resources individually for each database. This simplifies cache management while helping maintain balanced performance across clustered databases.

Databases associated with a GI cluster through the existing asmcluster attribute automatically participate in cluster-level cache allocation policies. Databases without explicitly defined cache allocations can also participate automatically, improving Flash Cache and XRMEM utilization across clustered applications and services.

Exascale innovations

This release extends Exascale with new capabilities that improve storage flexibility, cyber resilience, and workload management across consolidated database and storage environments. These enhancements help organizations scale infrastructure more efficiently, simplify administration, and optimize data placement and protection policies while continuing to leverage the performance, automation, and operational efficiency of Exadata.

Intelligent data tiering and placement with multiple storage pools

Exascale introduced a more flexible storage architecture for Exadata by allowing storage pools to span multiple generations of storage servers while fully utilizing the larger disk capacities available in newer systems. This allows organizations to expand Exadata incrementally while fully utilizing storage capacity across mixed-generation environments and extending infrastructure lifespan.

In Exadata System Software 26ai, Exascale now supports multiple storage pools for the same storage server media type, for example multiple HC storage pools, within a single Exascale cluster. This enhancement enables more intelligent data placement and workload-specific tiering strategies.

Organizations can now create separate storage pools for multiple sets of databases and workloads that require physical storage isolation while continuing to operate within the same Exascale cluster. Administrators can also tier data across pools built from different storage server generations, placing the most active data on the latest-generation systems while storing less active or archival data on larger, capacity-oriented pools.

These tiering strategies can be managed transparently through Oracle AI Database Automatic Data Optimization (ADO), enabling data to be automatically moved and compressed across tablespaces residing on different Exascale storage pools as data ages.

Immutable snapshots deliver tamper-resistant protection for trusted data

Exascale snapshots provide fast, space-efficient point-in-time recovery for databases, files, and volumes, while enabling rapid thin or full clone creation for development, testing, analytics, compliance, and recovery workflows.

With Exadata System Software 26ai, Exascale snapshots now support immutable snapshot protection through enforced time-based retention policies. Immutable snapshots cannot be modified or deleted before the defined retention period expires, helping organizations maintain trusted recovery points for critical data.

 Retention enforcement occurs directly at the Exascale storage layer, preventing retention policies from being bypassed and strengthening protection against ransomware attacks, regulatory compliance risks, and unauthorized deletion.

Organizations can also use immutable snapshots to create trusted point-in-time clones for recovery, testing, and compliance workflows while improving cyber resilience across Exadata environments.

Resource profiles simplify I/O management for Exascale volumes

Exascale resource profiles enable administrators to define and enforce I/O bandwidth and Smart Data Cache (Flash Cache and XRMEM) allocation policies.

In Exadata System Software 26ai, resource profiles can now also be associated with Exascale volumes and volume groups, extending policy-based performance management across Exascale storage resources and databases.

Administrators can apply a common set of performance policies consistently across volumes and volume groups within an Exascale vault, simplifying administration while improving consolidation and resource utilization across shared Exascale environments.

Flexible infrastructure and virtualization innovations

Exadata System Software 26ai introduces major new infrastructure and virtualization capabilities that improve deployment flexibility, simplify environment management, and increase operational efficiency across consolidated database environments.

This release expands how organizations deploy, standardize, and manage Exadata infrastructure through scalable shared storage for virtualized environments, customizable VM configurations, reusable guest VM gold images, and seamless dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 orchestration.

Move VM images to Exascale volumes

Exadata VM images can now be migrated onto RDMA-enabled Exascale volumes, enabling existing virtualized database environments to take advantage of Exascale’s scalable shared storage architecture.

By moving VM images from local storage onto Exascale volumes, X10M and later database servers can support better consolidation with higher VM densities while gaining access to advanced Exascale capabilities including snapshots, rapid cloning, and live migration.

Separating VM storage from physical database servers simplifies maintenance and provides greater flexibility for VM lifecycle management.

Customizable filesystem layouts

Exadata System Software 26ai introduces customizable filesystem layouts for bare metal database servers, KVM hosts, and guest virtual machines, enabling organizations to tailor storage structures and filesystem allocations before deployment to meet operational and application-specific requirements. For example, administrators can increase the size of the /var/log filesystem or reduce the size of /EXAVMIMAGES on KVM hosts.

Additional filesystems can be configured to support site-specific tooling, operational software, and organizational deployment standards. This added flexibility helps organizations standardize Exadata VM deployments while improving storage utilization and operational consistency across large environments.

Create customizable guest gold images

This release also introduces support for customizable Exadata-ready guest VM gold images, dramatically simplifying provisioning and operational consistency across large, virtualized environments.

These reusable images support customized filesystem layouts together with preconfigured Oracle Database and Oracle Grid Infrastructure homes, enabling administrators to standardize VM environments once and deploy them consistently across the Exadata infrastructure. This capability accelerates VM provisioning, reduces operational overhead, and helps organizations maintain greater consistency across highly consolidated deployments.

Seamless dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 orchestration

By supporting simultaneous IPv4 and IPv6 operation, Exadata System Software 26ai provides greater deployment flexibility while helping organizations prepare for long-term IPv6 adoption.

Strengthening least-privilege access for Exadata storage servers

Organizations can now take advantage of new least-privilege administration capabilities designed to reduce operational risk and minimize unnecessary root access across Exadata storage servers.

Restricted shell support now limits celladmin and cellmonitor users to approved cellcli and escli operations, helping organizations enforce tighter administrative access policies. Read-only access for cellmonitor further strengthens operational separation of duties, while time-bound root access through celladmin helps reduce privileged access exposure.

Exadata System Software 26ai also enables non-root Oracle Exadata Deployment Assistant (OEDA) deployment operations for storage-side tasks by leveraging least-privilege access controls instead of requiring full root privileges. This enhancement improves auditability while reducing operational dependence on persistent root access and simplifying secure management workflows.

Improving Exascale performance visibility and diagnostics

This release enhances ExaWatcher observability for Exascale environments with EDVSTAT, a new monitoring utility for analyzing Exascale volume I/O statistics using a familiar iostat-style interface.

EDVSTAT provides detailed visibility into Exascale volume performance metrics, including RDMA throughput and hit rates, Exadata RDMA Memory (XRMEM) cache utilization, Flash Cache activity, queue times, cache hit ratios, and disk throughput statistics. Administrators can quickly identify heavily utilized volumes and volume groups using flexible filtering and reporting options.

The utility supports both human-readable iostat-like reporting and optional JSON output, simplifying performance troubleshooting, automation, and operational analysis across large Exascale deployments while helping administrators identify resource bottlenecks more quickly.

Extending Exadata leadership for Oracle Database

Exadata System Software 26ai delivers some of the most significant infrastructure advancements in Exadata history, introducing breakthrough capabilities that expand how organizations deploy, scale, secure, and optimize Oracle Database environments at enterprise scale.

This release introduces the industry’s first live migration for RDMA-enabled database virtual machines, expands Exascale intelligence and deployment flexibility, accelerates AI and snapshot workloads, and helps maintain consistently high-performance during infrastructure maintenance operations.

Exadata System Software 26ai also strengthens operational control through deeper observability, more intelligent resource management, customizable virtualized environments, and expanded least-privilege administration capabilities.

These innovations also contribute directly to the overall cost savings of running Oracle Databases on Exadata. By increasing consolidation density, improving infrastructure utilization, simplifying lifecycle operations, and reducing the storage footprint of development, test, analytics, and AI environments, Exadata System Software 26ai helps customers do more with existing infrastructure. Capabilities such as VM Live Migration, Exascale shared storage, intelligent tiering, resource profiles, reusable guest gold images, and optimized snapshots reduce both capital and operational demands while maintaining the performance, availability, and resilience required for mission-critical Oracle Database workloads.

Together, these innovations extend Exadata’s leadership for AI, OLTP, analytics, and highly consolidated Oracle Database environments, delivering a more flexible, resilient, and intelligent infrastructure platform for highly available Oracle Database workloads at enterprise scale.

To learn more, review the Exadata System Software 26ai documentation and download instructions in My Oracle Support note KB153930, which includes release details, prerequisites, and installation guidance