Accessing raw drives from VirtualBox

In my previous virtualization series, I avoided VirtualBox because there was no GUI support for accessing raw drives, and I have a pair of 2TB Linux RAID drives that I wanted to use a Linux VM on my Windows host to assemble and export to my network as a set of network shares. However, when I wanted to see the Gnome Shell functionality of Fedora 15, I had no choice but to use VirtualBox -- it's the only virtualization solution out there that currently supports OpenGL acceleration for Linux virtual machines.

So given that incentive, I actually did it. The secret is VirtualBox's VMDK support for importing VMWare virtual drives. The VMDK header format allows creating a virtual disk that is actually just a pointer to a physical drive. So, I used the directions on the VirtualBox site to create two vmdk files pointing at physical drives and then add them to my freshly installed Fedora 15 virtual machine as "existing" drives.

The first thing to note is that on Windows Vista or Windows 7, you MUST run VirtualBox as Administrator to access physical drives. Otherwise your VM simply won't start (and you can't even create your virtual VMDK's if you're not doing it as Administrator).

The next thing to note is where Oracle puts all the binaries you'll need. So you'll need to pop open a Terminal window as the administrative user (i.e. right-click and "run as Administrator") and:

C:> path "%path%;C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox"

Then you'll need to find your virtual machines. For me:

C:> cd "\Users\eric\VirtualBox VMs"

did the trick.

Now you can run the commands. I knew from my VMware Player experiment what my two physical drives were identified as in Windows. They were identified as drives 0 and 1, while my boot drive (which plugs into the front) is identified as drive 2. So I went ahead and did it. Otherwise you may need to do a bit of poking around to figure out which drives to push. So anyhow:

C:> VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename Fedora15/Disk0.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive0
C:> VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename Fedora15/Disk1.vmdk -rawdisk \\.\PhysicalDrive1

Then I right-clicked my VirtualBox icon and ran it as Administrator (you will probably want to go into its settings via right-click on its icon and make that permanent for left-double-clicks too), clicked the Fedora15 virtual machine, then its Settings icon, hit "+", and added the two hard drives as "existing" virtual hard drives. I then started the VM and... success! I saw my two drives in /proc/partitions.

Well.... *almost* success. Fedora 15 didn't activate my arrays on that first boot. So mdadm to activate them, vgscan (to detect my volume groups after activating the RAID arrays with mdadm), then lvchange -ay to activate the detected logical volumes. But once I did all that I could mount my filesystems and add them to /etc/fstab, and Fedora 15 properly assembled everything on my next reboot.

So what's the downside of VirtualBox so far? Well... it's hard to say. One thing I *have* noticed is that YouTube videos do not play properly. Multimedia playback in virtual machines is always problematic because of timing jitter, and I suspect that being on a Windows host with its really lousy clock system doesn't help. But then, I can just view multimedia on the Windows host -- that's why I have it, for games and stuff that doesn't work well under Linux. Other than that, everything else seems to be working... and you can't beat the price: Free (for personal use).

-ELG