Hi guys, I'm still realy new. I was wondering If I want to have all my GamingVms use a SSD for say my steam library or general gaming storage location would I set it up as a Cache Pool and create a share or would It be possible or have any benefit to just pass the hardware directly through to the VMs? Trying to wrap my head around exactly how this stuff works best in certain situations.

Hi,

 

1) Yes, one of the options you to consider is to pass through SSD/NVME drive directly to the VM and use it for games storage. It is a nice options you'll get close to bare metal performance of the given drive. I've been using such option for years with my Samsung NVME drive with zero issues. The drawback is that this drive is not protected and in case of drive failure you'll loose your data. Which I think in case of games is not critical. Anyway you get what you get on the bare metal too.

2) Another option is to use BTRFS/ZFS pool and create a raw image drive for keeping your games. I would actually split your VM img and your game drive img for easier management. With such option you'll get your disk protection (in case of mirror or raidz setup), you 'll get instant snapshots , compression, l2arc caching (at least with ZFS options) and many nice to have 'enterprise' features. But you'll pay for it with your drive capacity (50% in case of mirror setup, ~33% in case of raidz of 3 disks). Performance wise the things will get complicated and you might expect slightly degraded performance, the same performance or even better performance. This all depends on your setup and tuning... And how much hours you want to spend on this.

3) Using an array for gaming vm is also viable option, because the array gives you a lot of cheap hdd capacity. However regarding the performance I would expect it will be the worst of all options.

 

All options will work out of the box for you. But since you're new to this, I'd recommed the first one. It is a no brainer.