Raid Array Shared

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MrJester

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Okay so I have a Raid Array mounted at /mnt/raid and what I want to do is have all those files shared within different VMs. I want them mounted as a physical dirve though not a NFS. Is this possible?? Can you create expandable Virtual Disk or just mount a directory structure like that. Thanks for the help.
 
if you mount a standard partition like ext3/4 on several VM´s you will get data corruption. think of using a shared disk file system like ocfs2.
 
MrJester said:
Okay so I have a Raid Array mounted at /mnt/raid and what I want to do is have all those files shared within different VMs. I want them mounted as a physical dirve though not a NFS. Is this possible?? Can you create expandable Virtual Disk or just mount a directory structure like that. Thanks for the help.
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Hi,
if your VMs are OpenVZ-VMs you can use bind-mounts. With kvm it's not so easy (cluster-fs like Tom wrote).

Udo
 
Thanks for the suggestion. Would you happen to have any how-tos on setting up a Shared File System like that?? Googling around hasn't turned up a good one at the moment but still looking. Again thanks for the help.
 
So as you were saying if I use KVM and just add the same virtual disk to multiple VMs that I would see data corruption would this happen by just accessing the data or is the issue with reads and write to the same files???
 
MrJester said:
So as you were saying if I use KVM and just add the same virtual disk to multiple VMs that I would see data corruption would this happen by just accessing the data or is the issue with reads and write to the same files???
Click to expand...

I guess corruption can only occur if you write something - not necessarily to the same file - simply don't use such setup - it is too dangerous.
 
Would you have any better suggestions I should look into? I am still researching ocfs2 but it doesn't appear to be what will fit my needs. It appears to be more geared toward clusters and what not. Everything I have is local on this one box. Thanks for the help.
 
NFS or samba.
 
Hi,

IIUC, the array hosts files to be consumed by applications or users, not de VM images.
To give simultaneous access to these files, you can either use:
* Network file sharing: NFS, CIFS/Samba like suggested tom
* Clustered, shared Filesystem: OCFS2 (ggl for ocfs2+tutorial returns valuable resources), GFS or, the one I'll opt for if my tests are good, GlusterFS (http://www.gluster.org) for its many feature (sharing, distribution, replication...), it's capability to be accessed with native NFS client, and the fact that it builds up upon our long time beloved FSs (ext3/4, XFS,...), keeping our good old tools at hand for bad times.

Hope it helps
Bests
 
Well the backup software I use to move my data to an offsite location only has a windows client at this time so the drives must be physical on a windows box to get my data to backup. So truely if I really cannot get this setup how I want then I will just mount them within a windows box and share from there. I would really like to have it mounted as physical within the windows box and then physical within a FreeNAS box to share within the rest of the network.
 
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