Any way of exposing a directory to as a drive to a VM Guest

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davidcole

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#177481 4-Aug-2015 07:51

I could probably do it with VMware Workstation shared folders - but when the Guests are "shared" - ie with autorun etc you don't have access to the shared folders feature.

Basically I have a WHS 2011 machine and I would rather have my client computer backups on the VM Host rather than stuck inside a VMDK file on the guest.

Anyone know of a way that I can fool the WHS 2011 Guest to have a new drive that is a particular directory on the VM Host. I know I can grab a physical drive, but I don't really want to do that either.

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darylblake

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#1358319 4-Aug-2015 08:13

Whats wrong with windows file sharing (apart from the fact it is a bit flakey).

I run Vagrant guests inside virtualbox and i can map particular folders on the disk through directly to a folder on the host. http://www.vagrantup.com however I have not used it with windows guests. In saying that, I cant see how you couldn't use windows file sharing.

davidcole

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#1358321 4-Aug-2015 08:15

darylblake: Whats wrong with windows file sharing (apart from the fact it is a bit flakey). I run Vagrant guests inside virtualbox and i can map particular folders on the disk through directly to a folder on the host. http://www.vagrantup.com however I have not used it with windows guests. In saying that, I cant see how you couldn't use windows file sharing.

Normal windows sharing? or Host shared folders in vmware?

Normal windows sharing doesn't work as WHS2011 wont allow you to use a network drive as a location for backups.
Host shared folders are allowed when running vmware workstation shared virtual machines (the auto start ones)....also I think drive show up as network drives which will probably have the same problem as windows sharing.

gjm

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#1358343 4-Aug-2015 09:00

in hyper v I just create a vhd in the host and then mount that on the guest to do backups into. Can unmount it and mount it again in Windows host if I need to get stuff out of it for any reason. Could you do something like that in VMWare?

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davidcole

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#1358344 4-Aug-2015 09:03

gjm: in hyper v I just create a vhd in the host and then mount that on the guest to do backups into. Can unmount it and mount it again in Windows host if I need to get stuff out of it for any reason. Could you do something like that in VMWare?

That's just normal virtualisation. Being able to mount the virtual drive on the host. You still have a potentially honking great big virtual disk file. I was hoping to not need the virtual disk file at all.