Hi is it possible to mount the unraid array shares as drives in a VM running on the unraid server?

 

Please could someone help me out with the XML syntax if its possible?

Hi is it possible to mount the unraid array shares as drives in a VM running on the unraid server?

 

Please could someone help me out with the XML syntax if its possible?

not as such.

 

However you can mount the shares as network shares inside the VM just like you would for a real physical machine.

 

What are you trying to achieve?  With more details you might get other suggestions.

Was hoping to mount them as a local disk, similar to how the isos mount only stopping at the folder level.   

 

<disk type='file' device='cdrom'>

      <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/>

      <source file='/mnt/user/Storage/ISO/Windows10Prox64.iso'/>

      <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>

      <readonly/>

      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='0'/>

    </disk>

 

Hoping there's something similar to this but without going into an iso and just stopping at the folder level.. and not being a cdrom device.

Was hoping to mount them as a local disk, similar to how the isos mount only stopping at the folder level.   

 

<disk type='file' device='cdrom'>

      <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/>

      <source file='/mnt/user/Storage/ISO/Windows10Prox64.iso'/>

      <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>

      <readonly/>

      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='0'/>

    </disk>

 

Hoping there's something similar to this but without going into an iso and just stopping at the folder level.. and not being a cdrom device.

There is no direct equivalent to that, although depending on the OS there are the so-called 9p drivers (I have never tried them myself).

 

What is wrong with simply mapping a network share as a drive inside the VM.  It would seem to achieve what you want without the need to try and do something clever.  That is how I access the contents of the unRAID server shares from a VM.

Was hoping to mount them as a local disk, similar to how the isos mount only stopping at the folder level.   

 

<disk type='file' device='cdrom'>

      <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/>

      <source file='/mnt/user/Storage/ISO/Windows10Prox64.iso'/>

      <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>

      <readonly/>

      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='0'/>

    </disk>

 

Hoping there's something similar to this but without going into an iso and just stopping at the folder level.. and not being a cdrom device.

There is no direct equivalent to that, although depending on the OS there are the so-called 9p drivers (I have never tried them myself).

 

What is wrong with simply mapping a network share as a drive inside the VM.  It would seem to achieve what you want without the need to try and do something clever.  That is how I access the contents of the unRAID server shares from a VM.

 

And that's the right way to do it.  9p is worthless in my eyes now.  It serves one purpose for our OpenELEC VM, but other than that, it offers no performance or manageability benefit that I can see.  Accessing the shares over SMB from within your VM is fine.

I can see where this may be applicable.

 

Sharing, say, a games library between multiple VMs would be a painless process if this could be achievable.

As of this time, setting up a Share as a Windows network drive works half of the time for things like games on Steam libraries, and it doens't work at all for Battle.net games (they totally forbid games in network drives).

 

In the scenario of Steam libraries: roughly half the games I've tested (~100) work perfectly when they are sitting in a network drive and being opened, and read, by Steam instances in multiple VMs at the same time (since they mostly read stuff and save their settings to each VM's Documents folder).

But the other half that has to make any changes to its games files fail to even launch most of the time, since it dislikes being in a network drive. In those cases those games have to be installed 'locally' on each VM.

By somehow mounting a Share as a local drive might 'trick' those programs to behave as installed in a local drive. However I suspect we're out of luck in the cases where a program locks files to itself.

 

So far I haven't had any luck in this subject: software that maps network drives as local drives usually have lots of issues as far as I've tested, and the most useful workaround that I've found is to sync a local folder to its network drive (there's plenty of tools like that, I'm using DSynchronize right now), at the cost of disk space.