VM Mount folder from host to Guest

[jeremyoha450]

Hi guys

How can i create a mount on the guest that uses a location on the host?
without using network.

regards
Jeremy

 

[morganL]

You need an internal bridge network....

Network |

Network

www.truenas.com

It "hidden" in a section of
"why should I use different interface types".

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

without using network.

Not possible. NFS or SMB it is. If you need a local mount point with full POSIX semantics, you could consider using TrueNAS CORE and jails. They can do that. VMs can't.

 

[mgoulet65]

If you include "without using network" do you mean shared storage or dedicated to the VM? I dedicate a zvol on my Scale server to a VM.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I dedicate a zvol on my Scale server to a VM.

That's a virtual disk. But you cannot access that via e.g. sharing on the NAS. It's a frequent requirement to have a folder that is accessible from inside a container or VM as well as from outside. In the case of a VM since the VM and the host don't share a kernel, networking, file system, anything, ... you must use a network sharing protocol for that mount. Docker on the other hand or jails on FreeBSD can do direct mounts with local access semantics.

You can e.g. run a MySQL server inside one jail, mount the directory containing the local communication socket ("mysql.sock") into three other jails, and use the database in these jails without a TCP connection. Similar for Docker as far as I know.

HTH,
Patrick

 

[mgoulet65]

That's a virtual disk. But you cannot access that via e.g. sharing on the NAS. It's a frequent requirement to have a folder that is accessible from inside a container or VM as well as from outside. In the case of a VM since the VM and the host don't share a kernel, networking, file system, anything, ... you must use a network sharing protocol for that mount. Docker on the other hand or jails on FreeBSD can do direct mounts with local access semantics.

You can e.g. run a MySQL server inside one jail, mount the directory containing the local communication socket ("mysql.sock") into three other jails, and use the database in these jails without a TCP connection. Similar for Docker as far as I know.

HTH,
Patrick

Right...which is why I said it was dedicated not shared.

 

[jeremyoha450]

bit silly that other VM solutions can do it but but kvm on scale cant :(

 

[morganL]

The NFS/SMB share provides sharing capabilities
The ZVOL option provides max performance
The 3rd option of mounting a host file system is interesting, but won't be available until a future release.

The technology is called virtio-fs... but only works with both VM and host support. If it's needed, I'd recommend adding a suggestion in jira.

QEMU/KVM + virtio-fs - Sharing a host directory with a virtual machine

Let a virtual machine access a directory tree on the host with virtio-fs

www.tauceti.blog

That technology will not be good for sharing data with other machines or VMs.....so make sure your application doesn't ever need to do that.

 

[mgoulet65]

bit silly that other VM solutions can do it but but kvm on scale cant :(

Keep in mind what Scale is and isn't trying to be. It is not claiming to be a fully featured GUI frontend to KVM. It is, in their own words, "...an Open Source Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) solution." Do I wish it could do some things? Sure, I'd love native qcow2 support for VMs from the GUI. But it isn't "silly" that it doesn't provide the feature you are looking for. It just is.