More than 3 hard drives => Fixed in 1.6

[Tom Parker]

For various tasks (e.g. testing new RAID setups), we need more than 3 hard drives. This can be achieved in VMWare (for example) by moving to SCSI drives instead of IDE. Alternately, more virtual IDE adaptors could be added (pretending to be PCI-attached maybe?). Also, if the optical drive could be swapped for an extra hard drive, that would be nice.

[MC]

This is still a problem, I believe it is not "minor"!

[Klaus Espenlaub]

This will be addressed in a future major release.

But what I'm really wondering is why it is such a huge problem for you, loomy. Virtual disks can be almost arbitrarily big, so it shouldn't be a capacity problem.

[MC]

Replying to klaus:

This will be addressed in a future major release.

But what I'm really wondering is why it is such a huge problem for you, loomy. Virtual disks can be almost arbitrarily big, so it shouldn't be a capacity problem.

The basic use is a virtual machine storage appliance that manages real disks sent to it. For example, today I could send four 1TB disks to a Vmware system, which would make for 5 disks total with the virtual guest OS disk as the fifth.

What does VirtualBox have over Vmware, however? VirtualBox apparently supports up to 2TB virtual and physical disks. The latest Vmware softwares only support 950GB virtual and physical disks! So you guys have a real leg up there.

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Hehe, and the reason for that 2TB limit is simply that we didn't bother to fix the BIOS supporting more than 32 bit sector numbers. Before we realized that limitation, we placed an arbitrary 8TB limit, which was just there to keep the disk image size slider in the GUI usable. Technically it would be no problem supporting much more, up to the LBA48 limit of almost 128 PB. But then it becomes a problem getting enough disks to store the image on :)

[MC]

Replying to klaus:

This will be addressed in a future major release.

I'm still waiting for this :(

[MC]

Replying to klaus:

Still waiting and praying for support of more hard disks. May the Sun shine upon us!

[MC]

Replying to loomy:

PS: There isn't a work around is there? A way to tweak the configuration files to get more disks in the vm?

[peter woodman]

I've been using a workaround of making extra drives iSCSI targets and connecting to them in the guest OS. This is far from optimal, as it's quite slow, but it does let me access data..

[Frank Mehnert]

1.6 will contain an AHCI controller which can attach up to 30 hard disks.

[MC]

Replying to frank:

1.6 will contain an AHCI controller which can attach up to 30 hard disks.

Thanks for the update frank. I searched everywhere for a roadmap... do you know when the first 1.6 release will be?