VirtualBox

Virtual storage

Overview

The VirtualBox driver registers a storage driver named virtualbox with the REX-Ray driver registry and is used by VirtualBox's VMs to connect and manage volumes provided by VirtualBox.

Prerequisites

In order to leverage the virtualbox driver, the libStorage client or must be located on each VM that you wish to be able to consume external volumes. The driver leverages the vboxwebserv HTTP SOAP API which is a process that must be started from the VirtualBox host (ie OS X) using vboxwebsrv -H 0.0.0.0 -v or additionally with -b for running in the background. This allows the VMs running libStorage to remotely make calls to the underlying VirtualBox application. A test for connectivity can be done with telnet virtualboxip 18083 from the VM. The virtualboxip is what you would put in the endpoint value.

Leveraging authentication for the VirtualBox webserver is optiona.. The HTTP SOAP API can have authentication disabled by running VBoxManage setproperty websrvauthlibrary null.

Hot-Plugging is required, which limits the usefulness of this driver to SATA only. Ensure that your VM has pre-created this controller and it is named SATA. Otherwise the controllerName field must be populated with the name of the controller you wish to use. The port count must be set manually as it cannot be increased when the VMs are on. A count of 30 is suggested.

VirtualBox 5.0.10+ must be used.

Note

For a VirtualBox VM to work successfully, the following three points are of the utmost importance:

  1. The SATA controller should be named SATA.
  2. The SATA controller's port count must allow for additional connections.
  3. The MAC address must not match that of any other VirtualBox VM's MAC addresses or the MAC address of the host.

The REX-Ray Vagrantfile has a section that automatically configures these options.

Configuration

The following is an example configuration of the VirtualBox driver.
The localMachineNameOrId parameter is for development use where you force libStorage to use a specific VM identity. Choose a volumePath to store the volume files or virtual disks. This path should be created ahead of time.

virtualbox:
  endpoint: http://virtualboxhost:18083
  userName: optional
  password: optional
  tls: false
  volumePath: $HOME/VirtualBox/Volumes
  controllerName: name
  localMachineNameOrId: forDevelopmentUse

For information on the equivalent environment variable and CLI flag names please see the section on how non top-level configuration properties are transformed.

Activating the Driver

To activate the VirtualBox driver please follow the instructions for activating storage drivers, using virtualbox as the driver name.

Examples

Below is a working config.yml file that works with VirtualBox.

libstorage:
  # The libstorage.service property directs a libStorage client to direct its
  # requests to the given service by default. It is not used by the server.
  service: virtualbox
  server:
    services:
      virtualbox:
        driver: virtualbox
        virtualbox:
          endpoint:       http://10.0.2.2:18083
          tls:            false
          volumePath:     $HOME/VirtualBox/Volumes
          controllerName: SATA

Caveats