The default configuration of the Oracle VM Agent uses a single service domain, the primary domain, which provides virtual disk and virtual network services to guest virtual machines. To increase the availability of guest virtual machines, you can configure a secondary service domain to provide virtual disk and virtual network services through both the primary and the secondary service domains. With such a configuration, guest virtual machines can use virtual disk and virtual network multipathing and continue to be fully functional even if one of the service domains is unavailable.

The primary domain is always the first service domain and this is the domain that is discovered by Oracle VM Manager. The second service domain, the secondary domain, is a root domain, that is a domain configured with a PCIe root complex, and it should be configured similarly to the primary domain. The secondary domain must use the same operating system version, same number of CPUs and same memory allocation. Unlike the primary domain, the secondary service domain is not visible to Oracle VM Manager. The secondary domain mimics the configuration of the primary service domain and is transparently managed by the Oracle VM Agent. In the case where the primary service domain becomes unavailable, the secondary service domain ensures that guest virtual machines continue to have access to virtualized resources such as disks and networks. When the primary service domain becomes available again, it resumes the role of managing these resources.

The following tasks should be performed in order to configure the Oracle VM Agent to use a secondary service domain: