Imagine needing to test a massive, 32-sled hardware rack, but you don't have the space, the budget, or the desire to hear a dozen industrial fans screaming in your office. For most engineers, that's a dealbreaker. For the team at Oxide Computer, it was just a problem waiting for a software solution.
The Magic of Voxel
Meet Voxel: the Virtual OXide Emulation Lab. Built by Oxide's Product Assurance team, Voxel is a sophisticated software stack that lets developers spin up a complete virtual Oxide rack without touching a single piece of physical hardware. It’s not just a simple VM; it’s a high-fidelity emulation of the entire ecosystem.
By leveraging illumos and Rust, Voxel integrates a suite of specialized tools to mimic the real thing. It uses Propolis for sled virtualization, FRR for networking, and SoftNPU to emulate the complex P4 switch logic. Essentially, it turns a standard workstation into a full-scale infrastructure playground.
From 'Raclette' to Pure Software
Oxide has always played with scale. They previously used "Raclette"—a reduced-size physical lab rack—to bridge the gap between a single server and a full deployment. But while Raclette was helpful, it still required physical hardware.
Voxel takes this a step further by removing the physical constraints entirely. This allows for deeper systems engineering and rapid iteration. When you can instantiate a full rack in software, you can test edge cases, failure modes, and networking configurations that would be risky or prohibitively expensive to replicate in a physical lab.
The Future of Hardware Dev
As specialized hardware becomes more complex, the "hardware-first" approach to testing is becoming a bottleneck. Voxel proves that you can achieve high-confidence product assurance by treating your infrastructure as code. It’s a glimpse into a future where the line between a physical data center and a local emulator is almost invisible.
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