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Sagar
Asked: 2010-08-11 09:12:09 +0800 CST

Sharing a drive between Windows and Linux

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The situation:

I have these virtual machines that are used for building software, and I'm trying to keep all the builds on the same "disk", if you will. The virtual machines:

2 x Windows
4 x Linux (3 Mandriva and 1 CentOS)

What is the best way to share a drive between virtual machines? I am currently using NFS (sharing a drive from Linux -> Windows using Services for Unix), but I'm not sure that is the most efficient.

windows linux share drive

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I usually lean towards running Samba on Linux to facilitate file sharing with Windows. Mostly because you don't have to worry about setting up custom services on the Windows side. That's a plus for me because I find it easier to implement services on the Linux side.

    You can mount the shares using the cifs filesystem type (which supersedes smbfs) on the other Linux machines.

    The samba software suite, as well as the cifs kernel module, are usually included by default in most distributions.

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  2. which virtual machine are you using ? Propably you could create a common shared disk. Have a look at http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/building-vmware-shared-disk

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