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Virtualized storage - hide from main OS?

W

Wladyslaw

n00b
Joined
Feb 25, 2012
Messages
16
Hi guys,

Im a bit of a noob when it comes to virtualized storage. Right now I have 5 1tb hard disks (4 data 1 parity) using snapraid. The data is mostly media which doesn’t get changed much hence the snapshot choice.

What I would like to do is move this storage to a different pc, and have it under the same configuration, but inside a virtual machine running on the pc. I would also like the disks not to be ‘seen’ by the pc (I’ll call this the real machine) – only the VM.

Is this possible at all? I know you can hide hard disks from showing up in explorer but still access them by typing in drive letters.. that’s ok. I just want to boot up the VM and have them all there under snap raid doing their thing only when I need it.

Thanks
 
You can do that in the ESXi as well as Xen. In VMware world it is called VMDirectPath or DirectPath I/O. The thing to keep in mind that you can passthrough a PCI device not a hard drive so you basically would need to passthrough HBA or RAID card. DirectPath also requires some special hardware support such as Vt-d or IOMMU so make sure that your pc supports that.
 
Hyper-V supports this too. You can assign the drives exclusively to the VM and the "host" won't even know they are there.
 
Thanks guys,

I will have a play with that, so can you pass through internal motherboard sata ports? Also how do you make it so the host doesn't dosn't know they are there (eg if the VM is off), wont they always show up in explorer by default?

Thanks
 
Tehnically you could passthrough internal sata ports, but then you would need to install host OS somewhere else. USB possibly. In ESXi at least once you configure device as passthrough device host does not touch it so it does not see what's connected to it.
 
In hyper-v you have to set the disk to "offline" in the disk manager before you can pass it through to a VM so while the host knows it's there the host OS can't access it unless it's put back online
 
Thanks guys, the "offline in disk manager" makes me understand how it works now. I read some guides online and it seems quite straightforward for hyper-V, so I'll give that a shot.
 
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