The backend storage for guest virtual machines in an RHEV environment can be derived from Storage Foundation (SF) components. SF as a storage management solution provides enterprise class storage management in comparison to the native logical volume manager and file system solutions. Storage for virtual machines can be configured after you install and configure SF components on RHEL-H hosts. Install the VRTSrhevm package on the RHEV Manager (RHEV-M), to enable the Storage Foundation Administration utility for RHEV. Run the utility on RHEV-M host to manage virtual machines.

After you configure storage for virtual machines, the exported Storage Foundation components are visible as SCSI-3 devices, cluster wide. Note that virtual machines can view only the DMP attributes but it cannot view the volume and file attributes because SF is installed on the host and not on the guest.

Evaluate the type of storage network you want to deploy. You can choose between either a SAN network or commodity storage array by leveraging Flexible shared storage (FSS) capability available in SFCFSHA or SFHA components. Using FSS means that storage may be local to each RHEL-H host. However the local storage is shared over the network for CVM and CFS. FSS potentially lets you deploy a SAN-free environment. It also scales the storage capacity vertically (memory, CPU, and so ont) and horizontally (multiple local storage arrays), each host serving both compute and storage needs.