Folder Passthrough/9p Possible?

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Before moving to Proxmox, my setup was an Ubuntu desktop with VMs managed by virt-manager. I have a 24 TB RAID array and this is where I would store my media files for Emby. I would then do a folder passthrough using 9p and pass through the Emby folder to my VM that is running the Emby server.

When I moved to Proxmox, I had my Emby VM store all the media files. But the problem with this is that each time I mess up my VM and delete it, I have to transfer all 7TB of data to a new VM.

Is there a way to store my media files in a host folder and pass it through a VM? How do I go about doing this? A link would be appreciated.

I know I can go the network route and use Samba but this will be slower so I'd rather not do it this way.

 

[oguz]

hi,

we don't support 9p explicitly but it can still be used, you can add in your /etc/pve/qemu-server/VMID.conf with args: followed by the command line arguments, it should work the same way.

you can also do a full disk or partition passthrough of a device to the VM (but then it cannot be migrated, due to physical passthrough). you can do something like qm set VMID --scsi[N] /dev/yourpart to pass it as a disk to the VM

When I moved to Proxmox, I had my Emby VM store all the media files. But the problem with this is that each time I mess up my VM and delete it, I have to transfer all 7TB of data to a new VM.

have you heard of snapshots and backups?

 

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have you heard of snapshots and backups?

Ha ha. I have heard of backups. I was just thinking if I backed up a 7 TiB VM, won't that create another 7 TiB VM? I'm afraid my 24 TiB ZFS Pool will run out of space rather quickly.

 

[oguz]

Ha ha. I have heard of backups. I was just thinking if I backed up a 7 TiB VM, won't that create another 7 TiB VM? I'm afraid my 24 TiB ZFS Pool will run out of space rather quickly.

no, it depends on the storage backend and compression. snapshots generally take less space

you can follow one of the other recommendations i made, there are a million ways of doing this with nfs, samba etc. or with other shared storage solutions as well

 

[1011010101101011101]

we don't support 9p explicitly but it can still be used, you can add in your /etc/pve/qemu-server/VMID.conf with args: followed by the command line arguments, it should work the same way.

You are my favorite person today, oguz. As you probably surmised already, I'm a total noob with this. I do want to implement what you mentioned above with putting args on the VMID.conf file. I will confess that with my previous setup, I've doing the 9p passthrough using GUI. Can you help me out with the command line arguments?

Assume that the folder from the host that I want to passthrough is /home/myname/emby and that the VM ID is 103 (Emby).

 

[oguz]

well you can follow the guide from qemu here[0]. it's a bit old but not much has changed (the relevant part is Starting the Guest directly)
the preparation steps should be already done (since qemu is installed) so you just need to add in the config like described. you'd add this in args: in the qemu-server directory like i mentioned

alternatively you can try to pass the physical disk [1] which is probably the easier option.

[0]: https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/9psetup#Starting_the_Guest_directly
[1]: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Physical_disk_to_kvm