Data store instances and provisioning strategies

You can create data store instances that point to different physical machines on your network, different directories on a machine, or the same configuration setting in different ways (for example, host name vs. IP address).

In the Provision Job, you choose the appropriate data store instance for the machines that you are provisioning. The following examples illustrate this flexible provisioning feature.

Efficient provisioning over the network

If you are provisioning servers in different LANs, you might improve network and provisioning efficiency by setting up two instances of the data store, one for each LAN. For example, consider the following network topology:

The example shows two data store instances:

• VLAN1 Data Store — points to data store 1 on VLAN 1
• VLAN2 Data Store — points to data store 2 on VLAN 2
  To provision target 1, you specify the VLAN1 Data Store instance in the Provision Job. Similarly, to provision target 2, you specify the VLAN2 Data Store.

Data stores for different operating systems

You can create data store instances to store the files for provisioning different operating systems. For example, consider the following topology. To provision one Linux machine on VLAN 1 and a second Windows machine, also on VLAN1, you can create two data store instances:

• Linux Data Store VLAN1
• Windows Data Store VLAN1
  

Both of these data stores can reside on the same physical machine — in this example on machine 1.

• The Linux Data Store VLAN1 instance points to the directory on machine 1 that contains the Linux installation files. Because Linux targets require the data store property LOCATION to be set to the data store's IP address, you must set LOCATION to machine 1's IP address.
• The Windows Data Store VLAN1 instance points to the directory on machine 1 that contains the Windows installation files. Because Windows targets require the data store property LOCATION to be set to the data store's host name, you must set LOCATION to machine 1's host name.