Mount hosts directory to KVM

[luison]

Not having "bind type" mount points from hots to VM has always been one of our main pullbacks from using KVM more extensively.

I am trying to avoid NFS, sftp or SAMBA as an option and have just been reading about VirtFS - 9p virtio drivers (http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/9p_virtio)
I've found some old threads about it here explaining that it is not actively supported as it breaks the HA philosophy of PVE but as in our case this is not an issue I was hoping to do some testing.

I was wondering if anyone can share any experience with it or alternative if system admins can confirm if theres any way I can define a virtFS that does not involve a kernel compilation. All the samples I find all refer to "/usr/bin/qemu-kvm" which does not seem to be part of the pve-qemu-kvm package.

Thanks.

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

as you correctly noticed Proxmox does not support 9p in the Virtual Environment.
But you can use it.
The kernel supports it.
If you want to use it, you can use "args: " in the VMConfig for it.
The needed rest information can be fount in the manpage of kvm.

 

[luison]

Wondering if there has been any change in this or what is the current best recommend solution to efficiently bind certain host directory or partition to a KVM. Is NFS or similar network filesystem the only supported option?

 

[leesteken]

Wondering if there has been any change in this or what is the current best recommend solution to efficiently bind certain host directory or partition to a KVM. Is NFS or similar network filesystem the only supported option?

All the ways that you can do this on a physical machine, you can do on a VM (NFS, SMB, iSCSI). Alternatively, you can investigate 9p and virtiofsd.

 

[luison]

Just found some updated threads regarding virtiofs (https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/virtiofs-support.77889/page-2) and @Drallas guide (https://gist.github.com/Drallas/7e4a6f6f36610eeb0bbb5d011c8ca0be).

Did I read somewhere that virtiofs support is expected to be included in PVE UI?