• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Virtualized file server with physical disks?

L

_leech_

n00b
Joined
Dec 20, 2006
Messages
25
Is it possible to set up a virtualized server to use physical disks? Here's an idea of what I mean (this would all be part of one PC):

HDD1: Windows host and Linux guest.
HDD2 + HDD3: Storage/Media, for the Linux guest to serve to the rest of the network.

The idea is to have two external eSATA hard drives connected to the main PC. The VM would then mount the external drives (RAID1) for the rest of the network to use. Basically I want to have NAS/file server functionality without having a separate box for it.

Would this be possible with VMware or VirtualBox?
 
yes but what would it accomplish that having the host serve it wouldn't?

I have done virtualized file servers in Hyper-V but I did it to play with Hyper-V.

The only real advantage is the ability to load the VM on any hardware if you have a valid copy of the VM.
 
Yea it can be done...but what is the point?

Your just adding an extra layer of complexity.
 
Well, I have a DNS-323 right now but i'm not exactly happy with it. I like it's features but it's performance is lacking, and it has some annoying bugs. I'd like to get rid of it, hook up the drives with higher performing eSATA, and replicate the NAS's features with a Linux server while adding some others that it doesn't provide (like a Subversion repository) without building another box. Plus, it would be easier to back it up and move to a new PC when the time comes and I like the convenience of snapshots.

Make sense?
 
Well yea...you wont be able to take snapshots of your virtualized storage....if thats what you are thinking. when you take a snapshot it creates a file the size of the VHD and you have to have a place to store that.
Also why not just have the Host do the network sharing and create the SVN repo directly on the host? Unless you have a need to segregate these in to separate machines for compatibility you will be making things slower and way over complicating things.
I understand the need for a box because I do not like prebuilt NAS's myself. So what im saying is get your esata enclosures and setup RAID1 on the host, share it, create a SVN repo with the RAID1 volume as the storage and be done.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Well yea...you wont be able to take snapshots of your virtualized storage....if thats what you are thinking.
Click to expand...

No, I was talking about the VM itself. I figure if I build an entirely new system I could just back up the virtualized server and move it to the new PC along with the drives and have everything up and running in minutes. Snapshots are just a convenience I've grown to like for experimentation.
 
Ok well then yea if you move around PC's then VM's with snapshots are the easiest way to do that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top