Registry regions

Each HCL VersionVault client is a member of a single registry region and can access only those VOBs and views whose tags are registered in that region.

A registry region is a tag namespace. With the HCL VersionVault registry, you can create multiple regions. VOB and view tags in an HCL VersionVault registry include the name of the registry region in which the tag is visible.

The registry initially has one region, as shown in the following figure. All clients are members of this region. All tags are created in this region, and are visible to all clients of the registry host.
Figure 1. Registry with one region

Figure 1. shows a registry with one region. A VOB tag and a view tag in the default region point to their corresponding VOB_object and view_object entries in the registry.

The most common reason for creating an additional region is to accommodate the different network file system naming conventions of each supported operating system when Windows® hosts that use dynamic views need to access VOBs or views hosted on Linux or on the UNIX system. (Snapshot and Web views do not require network file system access to VOB server hosts.)

Regardless of how many regions a registry has, each VOB or view tag in a region references a single underlying VOB or view object entry, which must exist before any tag can be created.

You might need to create additional regions for any of the following reasons:
  • Your network includes VOB or view server hosts that have multiple network interfaces and, therefore, multiple host names.
  • You create VOB or view tags that include multibyte characters, and the registry serves clients that do not use the same setting for operating system locale. Because the interpretation of multibyte characters is controlled by a host's locale setting (established on Linux and on the UNIX system through the LOCALE environment variable, and on Windows® by using the Regional Options tool in Control Panel), all tags in a region must use the same character set, and all hosts in a region must use the same locale setting.
  • You want to prevent access to specific VOBs or views from specific clients by assigning those clients to a region where tags for those VOBs or views do not exist.
An HCL VersionVault host is typically assigned to a region during the installation. You can change this assignment later if necessary by following the procedures in Assigning a host to a new registry region. To display a host's region, use the host node of the HCL VersionVault Administration Console, the VersionVault program in Control Panel, or the cleartool hostinfo –long command.
Note:
  • A VOB must have a tag in the region to which its server host is assigned. A VOB can have tags in other regions also.
  • If the operating system is not case-sensitive, using multiple regions may produce unexpected results when accessing VOBs with names that differ only by case.