Mounting VirtualBox vdi files

[Adam Vande More]

On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 10:20 PM, Adam Vande More <amvandemore at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 9:58 PM, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:
>
>> Is there any hope of a utility like mdconfig that would allow mounting a
>> vdi file directly?
>>
>> There's a tantalizingly-named ImageMounter/VBoxFUSE, which is probably not
>> what that implies.
>>
>> It would be great to be able to access vdi files without having to waste
>> time and space converting them to raw image files.
>>
>
> Not that I'm aware of, all tools that do so depend on having a fixed size
> image.
>
> You could use a sparse file for the raw format :P  I use some other methods
> for getting data from VM's to host and other machines.  One place I do work
> for is a linux shop with a couple Win 2k8 VM's.  All disk's are mapped to
> LVM's including 2k8's "dedicated" backup drive.  The backup drive(lvm) is
> then mapped via kpartx and mounted read-only in the host system so tarsnap
> archives can be generated against it.  I actually don't know how you'd do
> this under FreeBSD since I'm not aware of any equivalent functionality to
> kpartx under FBSD.
>

Actually just had another idea if you're using ZFS.  Just put the raw image
on it's on FS, and set it compressed.  Problem solved ;)

-- 
Adam Vande More