What is the best way to share a Data partition on a Linux KVM-QEMU host with a Windows VM guest?
I could use Samba networking and connect to the drive as a network share but I was hoping there might be a simpler way.
Thanks, Nick
I would use KVM's (and QEMU's) internal Samba networking (which you are referring to, I guess). It works just fine and is pretty easy to setup, just pass -net smb=/somewhere/data
.
-net smb
option. You do need a installed Samba daemon on the host, but you do not have to configure it -- KVM will do this for you. No idea how that integrates into virt-manager, though.
man kvm
says: smb=dir[,smbserver=addr] When using the user mode network stack, activate a built-in SMB server so that Windows OSes can access to the host files in dir transparently. The IP address of the SMB server can be set to addr. By default the 4th IP in the guest network is used, i.e. x.x.x.4. Then dir can be accessed in \smbserver\qemu. so you bassically have to call kvm ... -net smb=/mnt/data
and can access it in the guest via smb under \\10.0.2.4\qemu
virt-manager
IRC channel) linked me to his blog post that shows how to pass qemu-system
(kvm
binary's been deprecated since) arguments to libvirt
-based guests.