Oracle VM Manager stores information about various objects such as the storage components or repositories within the environment. In general, if all operations are performed via Oracle VM Manager it is unlikely that this information becomes inconsistent, however external modifications or manual updates may result in an inconsistency in the information available to Oracle VM Manager and the status of the actual component. For instance, if files are manually copied into a repository via the file system where the repository is located, then Oracle VM Manager is unaware of the changes within the repository and is also unaware of the changes to the amount of available and used space on the file system where the repository is located.

To handle these situations, Oracle VM Manager provides mechanisms to refresh information about various components. Manual refresh operations may be performed for storage at each level:

Each refresh operation triggers an action on one or more of the assigned admin or refresh servers to gather the information required and report it back to Oracle VM Manager. When these refresh operations are performed using the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface, or Oracle VM Manager Command Line Interface, child operations may be triggered to refresh other items of interest. For example, refreshing a repository also triggers a file system refresh for the file system where the repository is hosted, while refreshing a file server also triggers a refresh operation for every file system hosted on the file server.

When a file system is refreshed, it is temporarily mounted on the configured admin server and its utilization information is collected and returned to Oracle VM Manager. This is a resource consuming operation and can take some time to complete. Therefore, you should give consideration to the types of refresh operations that you may need to perform. For instance, if you only need to check the utilization information for one file system, refresh only that file system rather than performing a full file server refresh, which would result in many more child operations being triggered.

Some information in Oracle VM Manager can be updated automatically via a periodic function that gathers file system statistics as part of the regular health monitoring functionality built into Oracle VM Manager. This service takes advantage of the fact that file systems that are already in use by Oracle VM, for hosting repositories or server pool clusters, are already mounted on Oracle VM Servers within the environment. Oracle VM Servers that are already capable of providing other health statistics can also report periodically on the utilization information for any of the file systems that they have mounted. When this feature is enabled, the information reflected by Oracle VM Manager for any of the file systems that are currently in use is more likely to be accurate and consistent and less likely to require manual refresh operations. The settings to control the automated gathering of file system statistics are described in more detail in Preferences in the Oracle VM Manager User's Guide.