Once Storage Foundation HA (SFHA) is configured on the Linux server using the combined host and VM guest configuration, the next step is to create a disk-group in which the Golden Boot Volume and all the various space-optimized snapshots (VM boot images) will reside. For a single-node environment, the disk-group is local or private to the host. For a clustered environment (recommended for live migration of VMs), Veritas recommends creating a shared disk-group so that the Golden Boot Volume can be shared across multiple physical nodes.

It is possible to monitor the disk-group containing the Guest VM boot image(s) and the guest VMs themselves under VCS so that they can be monitored for any faults. However it must be kept in mind that since the boot images are in the same disk-group, a fault in any one of the disks backing the snapshot volumes containing the boot disks can cause all the guest VMs housed on this node to failover to another physical server in the Storage Foundation Cluster File System High Availability (SFCFS HA) cluster. To increase the fault tolerance for this disk-group, mirror all volumes across multiple enclosures making the volumes redundant and less susceptible to disk errors.