Using a share as a non network shared drive win 10

[cosmicrelish]

I use music software from native instruments. I usually run it on a bare metal machine. With my new server I wanted to run it in a com but it won’t instal the large libraries to a network shared drive, that being my share that I set up in unraid. I found out the software doesn’t work with nas drives. Being that I’m on the same machine as my share and running a vm does anyone know how to make a share act as a regularly mounted drive on the windows 10 vm so the software doesn’t see it as a nas drive?

[Energen]

8 hours ago, cosmicrelish said:

Being that I’m on the same machine as my share and running a vm does anyone know how to make a share act as a regularly mounted drive on the windows 10 vm so the software doesn’t see it as a nas drive?

Don't think there's any way to do what it sounds like you want to do.

 

All you can do from within your VM is to mount an SMB share, which is the same as a NAS drive, which is what it sounds like you did already.

 

The only thing you could do is install everything in the VM and then export your creations to your Unraid share.. but everything that 'runs' in NI has to be in the VM.

 

[Frank1940]

You do know that you can map an Unraid Share as a Mapped Drive in Win10. 

 

You open up the server in Windows Explorer.  Then right-click on the share you want to map.  Find    Map Network Drive...   in the list of properties.  It will suggest a Drive letter to assign.  If that choice is OK , look at the options to change any that you need, then finish the task.

[Energen]

That's an SMB share, which sounds like it not supported by his software.

[cosmicrelish]

Yeah the software doesn’t like mapped drives. It’s wants a local drive. Technically they are local but the system runs them as smb mapped drives. I suppose the only thing I could do is install a drive that is an unassigned drive and give that to the software. I don’t need those files backed up in the raid since I can always redownload them.  Or does an unassigned Drive also mount like an smb share?

[testdasi]

37 minutes ago, cosmicrelish said:

Yeah the software doesn’t like mapped drives. It’s wants a local drive. Technically they are local but the system runs them as smb mapped drives. I suppose the only thing I could do is install a drive that is an unassigned drive and give that to the software. I don’t need those files backed up in the raid since I can always redownload them.  Or does an unassigned Drive also mount like an smb share?

Simpler solution: create a vdisk on the array / cache (e.g. same location as your otherwise SMB mapped drive would point to) and mount it in your VM?

 

[cosmicrelish]

12 hours ago, testdasi said:

Simpler solution: create a vdisk on the array / cache (e.g. same location as your otherwise SMB mapped drive would point to) and mount it in your VM?

 

That’s an interesting thought! I’ll give it a go. How do you make a disk without creating a whole vm? And would it be a set size or can it expand if needed?

[testdasi]

3 hours ago, cosmicrelish said:

That’s an interesting thought! I’ll give it a go. How do you make a disk without creating a whole vm? And would it be a set size or can it expand if needed?

The easy way is to use the VM GUI. There's a green + button next to your current vdisk which you can click to add a new vdisk. If you want the vdisk at a different location from the default one then change "Auto" to "Manual" and enter the full path + filename of the vdisk (if doing this, I usually point to /mnt/disk# or /mnt/cache instead of /mnt/user so that I know for sure where my vdisk is stored). Then enter size and start your VM to create the vdisk.

 

Similar to mapping network drive via SMB, if you store the vdisk in the array then it's subjected to the same slow write of the array (unless you turn reconstruct write aka turbo write On, at the cost of electricity as your other disks will be spun up during write).

 

Vdisk is stored sparse (i.e. only the actually used space is allocated) so there's no harm to set a large size but make sure it's smaller than the disk it's being stored on (or the cache pool size).

Can't remember if it was the case for QEMU 4.2 but on 5.0 (included in Unraid 6.9.0 beta), you can add discard='unmap' to the xml tag and the vdisk would show up in Windows as thined provision and you can run trim on it (which will reclaim unused free space) to further reduce the actual use space (with some inefficiency due to where the data is stored - Windows will tell you on the Defrag and Optimise utility).

You can also expand the vdisk in the future (subject to the same size restriction I mentioned above) but I don't trust this process too much.

 

 

 

 

[cosmicrelish]

Great explanation! I found the vdisk settings. Do I use raw or qcow2?  I found out the main bulk of stuff I will need is a little over a terabyte. So if I create a 1tb vdisk but end up needing more, will it expand? Or do I make a bigger disk to start?  Will that also show within the raid that all that space is taken or will it only show the amount actually used?

thanks!

[testdasi]

3 hours ago, cosmicrelish said:

Great explanation! I found the vdisk settings. Do I use raw or qcow2?  I found out the main bulk of stuff I will need is a little over a terabyte. So if I create a 1tb vdisk but end up needing more, will it expand? Or do I make a bigger disk to start?  Will that also show within the raid that all that space is taken or will it only show the amount actually used?

thanks!

Doesn't matter either format is fine. I use qcow2 for small vdisks and raw for very large one because raw is very basic so fewer bugs (if any) so presumably better reliability.

 

If you stuff is over 1 TB then why create a 1TB disk, doesn't make sense right? You might want to read my previous post about vdisk size.

Also "within the RAID" <-- what RAID?

 

 

[cosmicrelish]

What I meant was I believe that stuff I need to store may be over 1 tb. Not sure exactly. So let’s say I create a 1.3 tb vdisk. Initially I store just 1tb on it but in a month we need to add more to it and that would then go ove the original 1.3tb size. Will it expand on its own? I say this because I created a windows vm and a vdisk of 200gb. I now need more space on that drive but windows is saying it won’t install something due to lack of space. 

[testdasi]

2 minutes ago, cosmicrelish said:

What I meant was I believe that stuff I need to store may be over 1 tb. Not sure exactly. So let’s say I create a 1.3 tb vdisk. Initially I store just 1tb on it but in a month we need to add more to it and that would then go ove the original 1.3tb size. Will it expand on its own? I say this because I created a windows vm and a vdisk of 200gb. I now need more space on that drive but windows is saying it won’t install something due to lack of space. 

No it won't expand on its own. There is a procedure to expand vdisk but you will also need to do run a partition manager to change the size from within Windows as well. There was reports of people corrupting their vdisk doing it so that's why I don't trust it.

 

As I previously mentioned: "Vdisk is stored sparse (i.e. only the actually used space is allocated) so there's no harm to set a large size but make sure it's smaller than the disk it's being stored on (or the cache pool size)."

So if the vdisk is on a 4TB HDD, there is no harm setting it at, for example, 2TB. You should also add discard='unmap' to the xml tag so free space is automatically reclaimed by the Windows optimisation.

 

[cosmicrelish]

Great! That worked. I did find how to expand a drive in unraid but in windows disk management it puts a recovery partition between the current usable space and the unallocated space so it won’t let me expand the drive. I’m not sure how to fix that. 

[JonathanM]

27 minutes ago, cosmicrelish said:

Great! That worked. I did find how to expand a drive in unraid but in windows disk management it puts a recovery partition between the current usable space and the unallocated space so it won’t let me expand the drive. I’m not sure how to fix that. 

Create another VM, linux template, set the os install iso to the gparted iso

https://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/files/gparted-live-stable/1.0.0-2/gparted-live-1.0.0-2-amd64.iso/download?use_mirror=newcontinuum

and the primary vdisk location to manual and point it at the vdisk that you need to edit.

 

When you start the VM it should boot the Gparted application and allow you to move the recovery partition to the end of the space and expand the primary partition.

[Frank1940]

Why don't you just purchase a HD (say 3X the max size you think you will ever need) and add it to the array?  Prevent any shares from using it.  Then allocate the entire drive to your Vdisk.

[Paul_Ber]

On 8/9/2020 at 7:56 PM, Frank1940 said:

You do know that you can map an Unraid Share as a Mapped Drive in Win10. 

 

You open up the server in Windows Explorer.  Then right-click on the share you want to map.  Find    Map Network Drive...   in the list of properties.  It will suggest a Drive letter to assign.  If that choice is OK , look at the options to change any that you need, then finish the task.

I know this is from 2020 but I know it is an SMB network share.  How is the actual speed of reading the network share eventhough it technically never leaves the Unraid box if the VM is running on the same Unraid box?

[John_M]

12 hours ago, Paul_Ber said:

How is the actual speed of reading the network share eventhough it technically never leaves the Unraid box if the VM is running on the same Unraid box?

 

It will be limited by the slower of the virtual network connection and the read speed of the disk.