Prepare a Shared Storage Location for the Archive

Language:

This procedure establishes shared storage where the source archive will be created.

Note - If you plan to use the alternate method to only include a subset of virtual disks in the archive, do not follow this procedure. Instead, perform Prepare Shared Storage (Alternate Method).

The storage must meet these requirements:

Shared storage – The location must be accessible to the source system and the target system. The archive is usually large. Using storage that is shared between the source and control systems avoids having to copy the file across the network to the source system.
Sufficient storage space – The shared storage must have enough available storage space to store the source archive. The file is usually very large (97 GB in this example). The archive will contain compressed versions of the guest domain’s virtual disks. As a best practice, ensure that the minimum shared storage space is equal to the guest domain's virtual disk storage, divided by 2.

In this example, the shared storage is created on the target system and exported using NFS. From the source system, the file system is mounted.

image:A diagram showing the relationship between the shared storage and the source and target systems.

Ensure that there is enough available storage capacity on the file system you plan to use for the archive.
1. Calculate the space needed to create the archive.
  Take the guest domain's total virtual disk size (obtained in Obtain Configuration Details from the Source Control Domain) and divide by two. This calculation to takes into account that the disk images will be compressed in the archive file, yet is conservative enough to ensure adequate storage space for the archive file.
  
  For this example scenario, this calculation is made (numbers are rounded):
  
  1396 GB ÷ 2 ≈ 700 GB
2. Identify available storage in the target system control domain, such as a data zpool, as in this example, vpool.
  The command output shows that there is 1006 GB available storage capacity, which is sufficient space to contain the archive for this example scenario.
```
root@TargetControlDomain# zpool list vpool
NAME    SIZE    ALLOC   FREE    CAP   DEDUP   HEALTH ALTROOT
vpool   1.09T   24M     1006G   1%    1.00x   ONLINE -
```
3. (If needed) Add storage space to accommodate the storage space requirements.

On the target control domain, create and export a file system for the source archive.

root@TargetControlDomain# zfs create -o mountpoint=/ovas vpool/ovas
root@TargetControlDomain#  zfs set share.nfs=on vpool/ovas
root@TargetControlDomain#  zfs set share.nfs.root=\* vpool/ovas
root@TargetControlDomain#  zfs set share.nfs.rw=\* vpool/ovas
root@TargetControlDomain# exportfs
vpool_ovas      /ovas   sec=sys,root,rw

On the source control domain, create a mount point for the shared storage, and mount the shared storage.

root@SourceControlDomain# mkdir /ovas
root@SourceControlDomain# mount TargetControlDomain:/ovas /ovas

On the source control domain, confirm that the shared storage is mounted and accessible.

root@SourceControlDomain# df -h /ovas
Filesystem                  size    used   avail capacity Mounted on
TargetControlDomain:/ovas   1.1T    24M    1006G     1%   /ovas

root@SourceControlDomain# ls -al /ovas
total 2097436
drwxr-xr-x   3    root   root   4   Feb 12 13:36 .
drwxr-xr-x   42   root   root  55   Feb 13 10:35 ..

Go to the next set of tasks.
See Lifting and Shifting the Guest Domain.