VM on a network drive?

marcosscriven · Mar 20, 2007

Hi

I tried putting my VM on a network drive, by cloning a local one, and making the destination a folder on the network.

But although it was succesfully created without errors, whenever I try to run it I get an error about not being able to read the disk's geometry.

I looked up the error here, and the only thing I could find was ensuring the files are read and write enabled, which is the case.

So what else could be the problem?

Thanks

Marcos

Pariahware · Mar 20, 2007

I'm having the same issue. After searching the forum many times today, I'm thinking that it is not possible. I tried creating Aliases, soft links from the Terminal, the "DMG trick", and changing the aliases in the hidden folder. Nothing has worked successfully.

mmischke · Mar 21, 2007

My guess is that Parallels is hard-wired to prevent this type of thing (disk image files not residing on physically-attached drives). OSs tend to be pretty I/O intensive and running a disk image from a network share would a) be very slow and b) create a lot of network traffic. Perhaps something lightweight like MS-DOS would work OK, but I wouldn't want to try running something like XP or Linux over a LAN/WAN/etc.

rhys · Mar 21, 2007

I had the same prob - only mine was after the upgrade to 3186. The message box would pop up because parallels was trying to load a second VM from a generic location it had.

What worked for me was to go to Parallels Desktop -> Preferences -> General and reset the location where my hdd, pvs, fdd files were now actually stored(ie, the location I now wished to use).

Then on startup parallels informed me that the fdd file was unavailable and asked if I wanted to continue without it. Say No and repoint it to where the fdd file now resides.

You should be good to go - I was. There may be other things you need to do because it's a network drive but this may solve the problem - at least it's a good start.

Good luck! Let us know if you get it worked out.

rhys

Pariahware · Mar 21, 2007

mmischke said:
My guess is that Parallels is hard-wired to prevent this type of thing (disk image files not residing on physically-attached drives). OSs tend to be pretty I/O intensive and running a disk image from a network share would a) be very slow and b) create a lot of network traffic. Perhaps something lightweight like MS-DOS would work OK, but I wouldn't want to try running something like XP or Linux over a LAN/WAN/etc.

Since my mini's hard drive runs at 5400 rpm, and my tower has a 7200 rpm, and that I have a gigabit network... running over the LAN would actually be faster than running directly off of the mini's drive.

Pariahware · Mar 21, 2007

I tried changing the preferences as suggested, and then adding the new aliases to the hidden folder. Still got the same error when attempting to start the VM...
Virtual machine cannot be started because of the following problem:
Unable to get the geometry of the virtual hard disk. Perhaps file /Volumes/Parallels/Parallels/winxp/winxp.hdd is not a valid virtual hard disk image file.

Pariahware · Mar 21, 2007

Well, today, the DMG trick is working... This is what I did:
1. Mount the network drive, in my case it is called Parallels.
2. Open Disk Utility and create a sparse disk image on the network drive. (Mine was 10GB, named "ParallelsImage", for WinXP & Ubuntu VMs)
3. Copy the VM folders to the root of the disk image.
4. Once copied, double-click the .pvs file for the VM you wish to run.
5. Change the default file location in the preferences to the DMG image's mounted drive.
6. Fix the path for the .fdd and point it to the mounted image.
7. In the hidden folder, change the aliases of the .pvs files to point to the new location.

I think that was it. I am now able to run Parallels off of my network drive! Woo hoo!

Mediocer · Mar 21, 2007

I did it a different way. At my school we have an xserve and a windows 2003 server.

I set up my mac side as usual, then I installed parallels, set up my windows side, ran sysprep, shut off my machine.
Used carbon copy cloner to make it a net-bootable dmg. Imaged the iMacs we are using (using netboot) and it seems to be working thus far. A couple of hiccups, but nothing re-imaging the machine wont fix.

I have network logins on the mac side and on the windows side. I used active directory to set up a mapped network drive on the windows side to save to the network, not on the machine.

If the students listen, their information is safe.

Any questions, let me know.

edit: for parallels to run correctly on the mac side for network logins (for my situation) I installed parallels as normal in applications, but put the .pvs and .hdd files in the HD->Users->Shared folder (I created a folder in Shared called Parallels). I set the rights to everyone with read and write access. If a student delete it, I just re-imaged the machine. We have a few extra iMacs per class, so if this is a case (that I have to re-image), usually there is not a kid without a computer.