Oracle VM is designed to allow you to use a wide variety of storage types so you can adapt your configuration to your needs. Whether you have a limited hardware setup or a full rack of servers, whether you perform an installation for testing and temporary internal use or design a production environment that requires high availability in every area, Oracle VM offers support for a suitable storage solution.
Making use of both generic and vendor-specific Storage Connect plug-ins, Oracle VM allows you to use the following types of storage:
Oracle VM does not support mixing protocols to access the same storage device. Therefore, if you are using Fibre Channel to access a storage device, you cannot then access the same device using the iSCSI protocol.
Usually the file system of a disk that is used as storage for an Oracle VM Server is formatted using OCFS2 (Oracle Cluster File System). The only exception to this is NFS, since by nature this file system is already designed to be accessed by multiple systems at once. The use of OCFS2 ensures that the file system can properly handle simultaneous access by multiple systems at the same time. OCFS2 is developed by Oracle and is integrated within the mainstream Linux kernel, ensuring excellent performance and full integration within an Oracle VM deployment. OCFS2 is also a fundamental component used to implement server pool clustering. This is discussed in more detail in Section 3.8, “How is Storage Used for Server Pool Clustering?”. Since OCFS2 is not available on SPARC, only NFS can be used to support SPARC-based server pool clustering or shared repository hosting.
To enable HA or live migration, you must make sure all Oracle VM Servers have access to the same storage resources. Specifically for live migration and virtual machine HA restarts, the Oracle VM Servers also must be part of the same server pool. Also note that clustered server pools require access to a shared file system where server pool information is stored and retrieved, for example in case of failure and subsequent server role changes. In x86 environments, the server pool file system can either be on an NFS share or on a LUN of a SAN server. In SPARC environments, the server pool file system can only reside on an NFS share.