What is the advantage of 2nd vDisk?

[Bugman1400]

Is there a reason to create 2nd vDisk in addition to the Primary vDisk?

[BRiT]

Depends on how you organize and use your vdisks.

[SpaceInvaderOne]

yes if you have a second vdisk you can store data seperate to the os. You can keep the os on a small vdisk and that makes it easy to backup and restore the vm. Plus by having the 2nd vdisk you can share this 2nd vdisk with more than one vm.

[Squid]

The exact same advantages to having a second hard drive (or a secondary partition) installed in a desktop computer

[Bugman1400]

Is there a feature in UnRAID to run a daily script....perhaps to make a copy of my vdisk1.img to another share drive?

[essjay]

yes if you have a second vdisk you can store data seperate to the os. You can keep the os on a small vdisk and that makes it easy to backup and restore the vm. Plus by having the 2nd vdisk you can share this 2nd vdisk with more than one vm.

 

So does this mean that if I have 2 VM's running and a second vdisk that both VM's could use this disk simultaneously and share data? (IE. both VM's seeing the same D:\ drive in Windows and sharing data)

[dmacias]

 

 

yes if you have a second vdisk you can store data seperate to the os. You can keep the os on a small vdisk and that makes it easy to backup and restore the vm. Plus by having the 2nd vdisk you can share this 2nd vdisk with more than one vm.

 

So does this mean that if I have 2 VM's running and a second vdisk that both VM's could use this disk simultaneously and share data? (IE. both VM's seeing the same D:\ drive in Windows and sharing data)

 

No. The filesystem would be corrupted if they were both trying to use the same vdisk. Libvirt probably wouldn't allow it anyway. But you could use it in one then stop the vm and use it in another.

[itimpi]

yes if you have a second vdisk you can store data seperate to the os. You can keep the os on a small vdisk and that makes it easy to backup and restore the vm. Plus by having the 2nd vdisk you can share this 2nd vdisk with more than one vm.

 

So does this mean that if I have 2 VM's running and a second vdisk that both VM's could use this disk simultaneously and share data? (IE. both VM's seeing the same D:\ drive in Windows and sharing data)

no.  A vDisk is no different to a physical disk in that it cannot be shared between two running VMs.    Trying to do so would be equivalent to trying to simultaneously plug one physical disk drive into two physical PCs.

[essjay]

OK thanks for verifying. So the only way to share data between VM's is network shares? Same goes for Dockers and VM's I presume?

[dmacias]

 

 

OK thanks for verifying. So the only way to share data between VM's is network shares? Same goes for Dockers and VM's I presume?

 

You can share data between linux VM's using 9p sharing. Basically you mount a local unRAID folder like /mnt/cache/downloads to each VM. There's options for it in the VM editor. You can share data between dockers using mount points too. Like share an unRAID tv share between two dockers.