Use virtual drive from samba source

Question

I wounder how could I use virtual disk (*.vdi) file located under samba (LAN) - so many of users can use same virtual machine and all software installations and updates w/o any need to sync between each other. I can do this in Win version of Virtual Box, but didn't manage to do this in Ubuntu.

How to mount VDI from Samba?

PS I use latest version (3.0.8)

here is situation: I have server, let's name it "A". On this host in shared directory (/vm) image.vdi file is located.

I wanna use this file with VirtualBox from my computer "B" (ubuntu). But there is no option to use external addresses in open dialog for "virtual disks" - I cannot just write //a/vm/image.vdi to pick up this file.

Answer 1

You would need to mount the share on your VirtualBox host, eg:

sudo mount -t cifs -o user=username,password=password //a/vm /mnt/vm-share

If you leave off the password=password option, this will prompt you for a password. Other handy options might be uid= and gid=. See the mount.cifs manpage for more options.

Once you have the share mounted, you can give the VirtualBox a local path to the VDI file (eg, if you have mounted the share at /mnt/vm-share, the file from your example should be accessible at /mnt/vm-share/image.vdi).

Note: This is how you would do it for one VirtualBox host. This method may have problems if it's active on multiple hosts concurrently.

Answer 2

I think that you want to mount your vdi file on your Ubuntu machine (here's a how-to - but I haven't tried it at all) and then share the directory where you have mounted the file using Samba.