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Network drives from within a virtual machine?


Kiptren

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I'm wanting to check something before I start working on a project; Currently I'm running DrivePool with 4 drives on a Windows 10 machine. I want to convert this machine to a Linux host, install Windows 10 as a guest using VirtualBox, share my four drives to have read/write access between the host/guest machine, and then run DrivePool from within the Windows 10 guest to manage these drives. Virtualbox mounts the shared drives as network drives.

 

Does anyone see possible issues with using DrivePool in this way? I don't have a huge performance demand, so read/write delays are OK. I'm just more worried about DrivePool even being able to manage networked drives in this way. I enjoy the product and find it an effective alternative to what I was using RAID for. I also have to much data on these four drives to off-load and re-establish as a RAID array under Linux. So I'm trying to do a work around to allow me to continue using the program within a virtual machine, with a few other Windows only programs I can't part with.

 

Also, with the above example, would I need to remove the drives from my pool prior to reformatting the current Windows machine? Or would DrivePool find the data when I re-add them as a new pool, once everything is setup under the VirtualBox guest machine?

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I'm wanting to check something before I start working on a project; Currently I'm running DrivePool with 4 drives on a Windows 10 machine. I want to convert this machine to a Linux host, install Windows 10 as a guest using VirtualBox, share my four drives to have read/write access between the host/guest machine, and then run DrivePool from within the Windows 10 guest to manage these drives. Virtualbox mounts the shared drives as network drives.

 

Does anyone see possible issues with using DrivePool in this way? I don't have a huge performance demand, so read/write delays are OK. I'm just more worried about DrivePool even being able to manage networked drives in this way. I enjoy the product and find it an effective alternative to what I was using RAID for. I also have to much data on these four drives to off-load and re-establish as a RAID array under Linux. So I'm trying to do a work around to allow me to continue using the program within a virtual machine, with a few other Windows only programs I can't part with.

 

Also, with the above example, would I need to remove the drives from my pool prior to reformatting the current Windows machine? Or would DrivePool find the data when I re-add them as a new pool, once everything is setup under the VirtualBox guest machine?

 

 

Dont use Virtualbox, its performance is very bad especially on network and storage. If you want to virtualize your NAS go full bare metal hypervisor on Hyper-V,ESXI, KVM or XEN.

 

I currently run a fully virtualized Stablebit Drivepool with Scanner on a Windows 7 guest running on top of a Proxmox Linux KVM Hypervisor, the hard disks are passed through to the Drivepool VM along with SMART data, it runs great with good disk and network performance and no problems for almost a month now.

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You're using Windows 10.  if this is Windows 10 Pro, then it actually includes HyperV.  And in that case, you can set up VMs that way, and this will get you better performance overall, actually.

 

As for sharing access with the disks, if you set up network shares on the VM, then this is fine. 

Otherwise, it's super complicated. 

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