Share physical drive with guest VM

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mveras1972

New Member
Jul 19, 2021
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I have a hyper-v guest running Windows 10 on a Windows 2016 host server and I have several HDDs on the host. I want to share a drive with the guest VM. Let me be clear, that I am not talking about a network share. I am talking about having the HDD drive natively appear with its own drive letter on both the host and the guest VM at the same time. This is not a system drive, it is just a data drive. It's just a storage drive that I need to appear on both the host and guest. It cannot be a folder junction, link, shortcut, or anything else. It has to appear as if the drive is hooked up directly to both the VM and the host. Is this possible?
 

cesmith9999

Well-Known Member
Mar 26, 2013
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You cannot share the same disk with 2 different PC's without a cluster (and then it is a shared disk).

The only way to do this is to share the drive on the server and have the windows VM net use the share.

Chris
 

mveras1972

New Member
Jul 19, 2021
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You cannot share the same disk with 2 different PC's without a cluster (and then it is a shared disk).

The only way to do this is to share the drive on the server and have the windows VM net use the share.

Chris
Thank you Chris. Is a cluster something I can do in software or does it require extra hardware?
 

cesmith9999

Well-Known Member
Mar 26, 2013
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you cannot mix windows 10 and server 2016 in a cluster. all of the nodes on the server cluster must be of the same version except during upgrades to server 2019.

on the hardware side the answer is "it depends"... some clusters need cluster hardware others do not.

what are you really trying to do here? there is a process that you want to do that requires you to want this.

in my case many years ago it was to put backblaze on a windows 10 client and share out all of my media to both the server running plex and the workstation to have backblaze back it up... I gave in and just backed up to B2 storage.

Chris
 

mveras1972

New Member
Jul 19, 2021
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Chris, that is too funny because I want to do exactly the same. I have a Plex server on Win 2016 and the VM running Win 10 and want to install Backblaze on Win 10 to back it up. I have been struggling with Crashplan. It just doesn’t work on the server and I haven’t found any other way to reliably backup the 1.5 million files (about 13 TB). I have a Google Business account but the Google Drive software just stalls during backup. Crashplan finds it’s too many files and just stalls. I wanted to try Backblaze and see what happens.
What I can do is virtually attach the hard drives to the VM and detach them from the host and then do a network mapping to the host. However, I am afraid this will require Plex to rebuild its database from scratch.
 

gregsachs

Active Member
Aug 14, 2018
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Chris, that is too funny because I want to do exactly the same. I have a Plex server on Win 2016 and the VM running Win 10 and want to install Backblaze on Win 10 to back it up. I have been struggling with Crashplan. It just doesn’t work on the server and I haven’t found any other way to reliably backup the 1.5 million files (about 13 TB). I have a Google Business account but the Google Drive software just stalls during backup. Crashplan finds it’s too many files and just stalls. I wanted to try Backblaze and see what happens.
What I can do is virtually attach the hard drives to the VM and detach them from the host and then do a network mapping to the host. However, I am afraid this will require Plex to rebuild its database from scratch.
I believe that if you add the new path to each library, then force a scan, plex will find the "duplicates", then you can remove the old path. YMMV, backup, etc...
also see here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/76xhgc for a way to just update the plex db manually.
 

mveras1972

New Member
Jul 19, 2021
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I’m going to try with one drive at a time and see how it goes. I will deactivate it from the host and virtually connect it to the guest VM. Then share it from the guest and map it to the same letter on the host. I believe that should not make any difference to Plex.