Enable the possibility to mount NBD devices

[alvistar]

Hi,
I would like to mount a physical disk from a NAS using NBD as main disk for a VM.

I suppose this should be possible as there is
VZNetworkBlockDeviceStorageDeviceAttachment -> https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vznetworkblockdevicestoragedeviceattachment

Ideally it would be nice to provide a nbd url as disk so it would be able to mount on start.

Thanks for everything

[fkorotkov]

Let's make it happen! We were looking for someone seeking this use case.

Could you please share your setup? What kind of NAS do you use which supports NBD out of box?

[edigaryev]

What kind of NAS do you use which supports NBD out of box?

I'm also interested in this. Might be useful for others, see #737.

[alvistar]

Hi,
thanks for quick replies.

Not out of my box unfortunately. I am using Truenas which is based on Freebsd so nbd-server is supported but the package need to be installed and configured outside the UI and not officially supported.

The only way to share block devices would be Iscsi but there is no native support on Macos.

[DrDonk]

I think another opportunity with this is to use qemu-nbd and mount other more traditional v12n file formats (qcow2, vmdk, ...) to store the VM. The vz Go bindings to HVF have a pull request for this and have shown you can install and run macOS from qcow2.

Code-Hex/vz#156

The Apple sparse disk files are great except when you need to move to non-APFS drives at which point we all know the size expands to the defined size.