Talk to VM through host operating system

Question

I have here a Windows distribution server that runs an ANT task to build enterprise software. What I need to do is to have the ANT task copy and run a VM image (Linux), and then...talk to that Linux VM through the host operating system (through the ant task itself). We need to be able to send files and/or commands to it.

Is there a practical way to go about this? I know that we already have a way to send commands to VMs that are also running Windows (so windows-windows interaction) -- but is there a way to do a windows-linux interaction?

Answer 1

Using ssh is probably the simplest. There is an ant task for that. Scp task is also there to copy files

Answer 2

It will depend on what you need to do, but:

• The Linux system could expose an SSH server, and the host can do just about anything it needs to via SSH.
• The Linux system could expose a web service that the host consumes.
• The Linux system could expose a Samba share which the host then connects to and reads/writes from (if all you need to do is deal with some files, but that seems unlikely).

There are probably dozens of options.