How to disable drive (in sata or sas controler) in runtime

[ershovp]

We have guest linux machine and need disable drive and at the same time guest machine should be in Runnig status.

Is it possible to do with VirtualBox SDK? or as there be anything else?

[mpack]

A lot more information needed. Define "disable" - does this mean sudden disconnect? Define "running" - do you mean the VM keeps running, or the OS keeps running? And which drive are you talking about? - system drive? swap drive? some removable peripheral drive?

Anyway, making a guess at some of these answers, the most obvious technique I can think of is to have the VDI on a USB stick, and just yank it as required. Expect corruption of course.

[ershovp]

> A lot more information needed. Define "disable" - does this mean sudden disconnect? Define "running" - do you mean the VM keeps running, or the OS keeps
> running? And which drive are you talking about? - system drive? swap drive? some removable peripheral drive?

isable drive means - remove drive in guest VM (hard drive).
running means - guest VM running

So the question is: How do I remove the disk (hard disk) from a running VM. And disk is vdi fixed drive created with command `VBoxManage createhd --variant Fixed --filename drive.vdi --size 1000` and attached to VM.

[Perryg]

AFAIK hot swap is not a function of VirtualBox. Supposing you could do this as mpack says you should expect the drive to have corruption.
If the second drive is mounted manually then it may be possible to actually unmount it but here again I would test this in a non production environment due to the reasons stated above.
umount -l /dev/sdb1 (if that is sata and mounted manually on in fstab) This is actually done on the guest and files must not be in use.

[jdavidbakr]

One use of VirtualBox is to test stuff on a virtual environment before taking it to a production system. Today I was experimenting with software RAID in Linux and wanted to see what would happen if I removed a running drive, and swapped it in with an empty drive, simulating a server with hot swap capability. I was able to do my testing but had to shut the machine down between swaps. Just saying this to say that there is occasion (although I admit quite obscure) that hot swapping a hard drive would be something you'd want to do.

[mpack]

Well, just because one person wants to do it (once) doesn't mean that VBox has to have features to support it which incidentally complicate the UI and perhaps also the runtime performance - ISTM this is way down the priority queue.

[jdavidbakr]

Well, just because one person wants to do it (once) doesn't mean that VBox has to have features to support it which incidentally complicate the UI and perhaps also the runtime performance - ISTM this is way down the priority queue.

Oh, I absolutely agree, I wasn't trying to make an argument for getting something like this into the app.

[Martin]

Maybe what you are trying can be done with iSCSI by disabling the disk on the iSCSI target.