Local storage consists of hard disks installed locally in your Oracle VM Server. In a default installation, Oracle VM Server will only use the first disk (/dev/sda), leaving other disks available for storage.

As long as no partition and data are present the device will be detected as a raw disk. The choice is yours to use the local disks either to provision logical storage volumes as disks for virtual machines or to install a storage repository. If you place a storage repository on the local disk, an OCFS2 file system is installed.

Local storage is fairly easy to set up because no special hardware for the disk subsystem is required. Since the virtualization overhead in this setup is limited, and disk access is internal within one physical server, local storage offers reasonably high performance.

However, the downsides are quickly revealed when you think about configurations with multiple Oracle VM Servers. Local storage by definition remains local and cannot be shared between different servers. Therefore, even if you set up a pool of multiple servers and use the advantages of clustering, virtual machines using local storage can never benefit from high availability: they cannot be migrated from one server to another.