The term node is a fairly generic one that has many different meanings in the IT industry. For example, network engineers call any addressable device attached to their network a node. Unix administrators commonly use the term interchangeably with host or server. Oracle DBAs often refer to a database server that is a member of an RAC cluster as a node. Oracle’s documentation uses the term compute when referring to the database server tier of the platform. In this chapter, we will discuss the various ways in which you can configure your Exadata compute nodes, whether they are members of an RAC cluster (nodes) or nonclustered (database servers).