How do you manage shares?

Hi guys

 

I have been using Esxi with Unraid for some time and really happy with that. Now I am currently moving some friends servers over from Plugins to XEN + VMS and that made me start wondering how people are managing shares from Unraid to Guests.

 

Fist off lets start with the dilemma:

 

Lets make an example where I have 3 shares that are all shared with a guest via samba (the same dilemma applies to NFS):

 

/mnt/user/Movies
/mnt/user/Music
/mnt/user/Misc

 

If I am in Unraid i can instantly move files from one user share to another since the operating system knows that it´s just moving the file on the same filesystem.

However if I´m in the guest VM the operating system does not know that these 3 shares are all on the same host and has to copy the files between the shares:

 

Unraid: 
"mv /mnt/user/Misc/somefile.avi /mnt/user/Movies"  -> the file is moved instantly

Guest OS: 
"mv //Misc/somefile.avi /net/Movies" -> The file is copied from the //Misc through the Guest to //Movies = Really slow

 

This makes it really difficult to use automated programs on the guest OS since every file is copied instead of just moved.

 

My first solution

 

In the beginning I made a ".new" folder in every share and copied everything new into that first. So I would copy a unsorted movie file to //Movies/.upload and the post processor could move the file anywhere within //Movies without the need to copy it

 

My current solution

 

Now I´m using a empty share called VMGUEST that only contains symbolic links to the folders I want the VM to get access to:

/mnt/user/VMGUEST then contains a symbolic link to Movies, Music & Misc:

 

/mnt/user/VMGUEST/Movies -> /mnt/user/Movies/
/mnt/user/VMGUEST/Music -> /mnt/user/Music/
/mnt/user/VMGUEST/Misc -> /mnt/user/Misc/

 

That means that my fstab only has the one samba mount (//VMGUEST) and the VM´s operating system knows that files moved between the folders can just be moved.

 

Other ideas?

 

Of course it would be easy just to make one big share called /mnt/user/Media and have Movies, Music and Misc under that, but that is a solution I don´t like

 

Another solution would be to share the whole /mnt/user directory via smb-extra.conf - but I don't like that either

 

Your solution?

 

How are you guys managing your guest shares?

 

TL:DR

How do you setup your guest shares so the guest can move/postprocess files between folders without needing to copy the files between samba shares?