Mimic VirtualBox Shared Folders feature?

[CGC]

I'm a longtime Virtual Box user and I'm just starting to work with my first instance of Proxmox. Virtual Box has a feature called Shared Folders that lets a VM read a host file system. As an example:

I have /largedrive/stuff on my desktop, I share that folder with a virtual machine, and tell the VM to mount it at /stuff.

The use case is that I have hundreds of gigabytes of carefully curated material and I need to permit multiple VMs to have access to various portions to do analytical stuff with the content. The VMs get read only access, updates are handled only by the host. The goal is avoiding a situation where I have two dozen VMs that are each a quarter terabyte of disk space, when the analytical results are just tens of megabytes.

if it makes a difference, the content to be shared is a ZFS data set.

I have been poking at the web interface, Googling, and bugging ChatGPT. I haven't found anything even vaguely like what I describe. Am really hoping the answer here is not something involving NFS.

 

[bbgeek17]

I cant see what is wrong with NFS, but if you insist not to NFS then https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-storage-host-to-vm-folder-passthrough-with-9p.122125/

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Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[CGC]

I cant see what is wrong with NFS, but if you insist not to NFS then https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-storage-host-to-vm-folder-passthrough-with-9p.122125/

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Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

The no NFS is for efficiency's sake, as well as network stack cleanliness. The 9p passthrough looks like it might be the right way to do this.

 

[CGC]

I cant see what is wrong with NFS, but if you insist not to NFS then https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-storage-host-to-vm-folder-passthrough-with-9p.122125/

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Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

OK, this is completely baffling.

Adding plan 9 stuff to initrd no problem.

Seems like some packages are being retired re: plan 9, but 9base and 9mount still exist. This makes /usr/lib/plan9/bin

There is nothing in Debian mkfs to format a volume as 9p. There isn't anything in this new folder that does formatting. Asking ChatGPT produces some nonsense about using the mk command to format, but that seems to be a plan 9 specific version of make?

I am not going to be doing a fresh install of a VM using 9p, I have some data I want to make available to multiple VMs. How do I get the storage formatted?

 

[bbgeek17]

9p is not a filesystem, its a protocol.
Google is a perfectly good search engine still "wiki 9p debian" : https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/9psetup

The disk you present has to be mounted on the hypervisor, and that implies having a filesystem - anything will do (ext, zfs, xfs, etc).

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Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[leesteken]

SPICE has webDAV, which is probably like VirtualBox but 9p and virtiofsd are probably easier with headless VMs.