Raid array as the single primary partition of a hard drive
Posted: 18. Jun 2009, 12:51
Hi,
I want to run a Samba file server in a VirtualBox guest (guest and host OS are Linux). The amount of data I’m handling is quite large (approx 1TB) and I don’t want to store it in a VDI container as I’m simply too afraid of losing everything in case of a VDI file corruption.
I want to store my data in a raid 5 partition using software raid and still be able to access my data even if VB does not work anymore or if I want to move to another virtualization technology in the future (in fact, I’m doing this at this moment as I’m migrating my server from Xen to VirtualBox): this means that I should be able to mount my raid array as a filesystem in the host if I need to.
If I understood correctly, the only thing that can be passed to a guest is a complete hard drive or a subset of the partitions of a whole hard drive but this will be handled within the guest as a hard drive.
I think that the only way to achieve this would be to combine a mbr with my /dev/mdX array to fake a real hard drive using a vmdk file but I’m not even sure that this will work.
If this is doable, would somebody have a kind of howto that could help me?
Many thanks in advance.
I want to run a Samba file server in a VirtualBox guest (guest and host OS are Linux). The amount of data I’m handling is quite large (approx 1TB) and I don’t want to store it in a VDI container as I’m simply too afraid of losing everything in case of a VDI file corruption.
I want to store my data in a raid 5 partition using software raid and still be able to access my data even if VB does not work anymore or if I want to move to another virtualization technology in the future (in fact, I’m doing this at this moment as I’m migrating my server from Xen to VirtualBox): this means that I should be able to mount my raid array as a filesystem in the host if I need to.
If I understood correctly, the only thing that can be passed to a guest is a complete hard drive or a subset of the partitions of a whole hard drive but this will be handled within the guest as a hard drive.
I think that the only way to achieve this would be to combine a mbr with my /dev/mdX array to fake a real hard drive using a vmdk file but I’m not even sure that this will work.
If this is doable, would somebody have a kind of howto that could help me?
Many thanks in advance.