As described in Section 4.1, “Storage Overview”, Oracle VM Manager distinguishes between File Servers and Storage Arrays in the Storage tab of the Hardware view. Depending on your hardware and networking configuration, external storage may be detected during discovery of the Oracle VM Servers or a rescan of their physical disks. Local storage is always detected during this discovery operation.

An external storage element is created on storage hardware: a server configured for NAS offering NFS shares, generic iSCSI targets and LUNs, or SAN devices from your preferred storage vendors. The server or disk subsystem offering the storage simply needs to be reachable by the Oracle VM Servers in the Oracle VM environment through a Fibre Channel or Ethernet network. The external storage is offered as a mount point (NFS share) or LUN (iSCSI and fibre channel) which can be discovered through Oracle VM Manager as a potential location for a repository, or a raw disk for use with a VM.

The typical way to attach external storage to the Oracle VM environment is to create a new storage entity in Oracle VM Manager and point to the location of the external storage provider while selecting the appropriate Storage Connect plug-in.

Subsequently, you may choose to configure a storage repository on one or more of the discovered storage entities in order to make storage resources available to servers and server pools in the Oracle VM environment.

These preparation and configuration steps are covered in the following topics. Storage repository configuration is covered in Section 4.8, “Preparing and Configuring Storage Repositories”.