To add storage to the Oracle VM environment, you must first discover it. The discovery process connects to the storage and discovers the file systems or disks available, and configures them for use with Oracle VM.

Discovering a File Server

In Oracle VM, the term file server is used to indicated file-based storage made available to the environment from another physical server, as opposed to local storage. Describing the technology used to expose file systems, NFS shares and so on, is beyond the scope of this guide. The procedure linked to below explains how you can bring the exposed file-based storage into Oracle VM, prepare it for the installation of a storage repository, and configure the file server and discovered file systems.

Before you discover a file server, make sure that your storage server exposes a writable file system to the storage network of your server pool.

To discover a file server, use Discover File Servers on the Storage tab to display the Discover a File Server dialog box, which is used to discover the external storage mount points. To discover a file server, see Discover File Server in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide.

Discovering a SAN Server

Make sure that your storage array server exposes raw disks (Fibre Channel SAN volumes, iSCSI targets and LUNs) to the storage network of your server pool.

To discover a storage array (SAN) server, use Discover SAN Server on the Storage tab to display the Discover SAN Server dialog box, which is used to discover the external storage elements. To discover a storage array, see Discover SAN Server in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide.

After discovering a file server and its file systems, or a storage array, it is ready to be used either for storage repositories or as server pool file systems. A server pool file system is selected during the creation of the server pool (see Section 6.7, “How are Server Pools Created?”); to create storage repositories on your file systems, see Section 4.3, “How is a Repository Created?”.