1. A method of enabling access to physical storage on a network storage system, the method comprising the steps of: implementing a virtual hardware environment by a container thread executing on the network storage system; running a guest operating system in the virtual hardware environment; registering, by the guest operating system, a virtual storage device in the virtual hardware environment; and writing data to or reading data from the virtual storage device by the guest operating system to enable access to the physical storage on the network storage system without resorting to the container thread.