Re: [opensuse] Mounting an vmware virtual disk in Linux.

On Feb 17, 2008 6:12 PM, Carlos E. R. <robin.listas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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The Sunday 2008-02-17 at 17:50 -0500, Greg Freemyer wrote:

See? There is no need to warn about wrong kernel version, use any network,
etc. I did it. It just took some time for me to think it out, I thought I
would have to use the device mapper when I discovered the -o option for
losetup.

I think they call that "whistling to your grave", or something like that.

Seriously, the above creates a situation where both vmware and suse
think they own the drive and are maintaining there own caches, etc.
This gets extremely dangerous if they both start making changes. ie.
they both can claim an inode for different uses. lots of other issues.

No! No, because I make certain that the virtual machine has been stopped
first. I know very well I must not make use of the same file structure at
the same time from vmware and linux.


So _if_ you want direct access like this, you have to use a CFS
(cluster file system). Those are typically implemented via a
network!!!! And I don't know any that are multi-OS.

I have not followed this thread, so I don't know what vmware is
suggesting, but I would just share the drive out of the guest and use
NFS or CIFS to mount it on the host. Those are layered protocols that
live above the base local filesystem.

That's what I normally use, but it is very slow (in my machine the guest
is real slow), and I wanted to run antivir on the disk image and not be
waiting a whole day.

So I wanted full direct access to the virtual disk - in read only mode,
just in case.

Are your vmware virtual drives fully allocated, or did you set them up
to grow as needed?

If fully allocated, I don't immediately see a problem with what your
doing, especially if it is read-only.

I have no idea how the"grow as needed" vmware drives are structured,
but somehow I doubt a simple loopback device will work.

Greg
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