Hello everyone, this is my first post here and I apologize if this is the incorrect forum. I also couldn't find anything relating to this question in the forum search.

 

Anyways, I'm building two gaming VMs using unraid and I was wondering if I should have a single share that both VMs can use to access games or if I should assign each VM their own game install drive. My main concern would be if load times or performance would take a significant hit if we're their both playing the same game.

1) 2 VMs using the same share to access is the games a bad idea. Transfers would be catastrophic (even more so if it's a network share)

 

2) Corruption of sauvegame data if the game saves in the same directory (the savegrde would be constantly overwritten by the other PC)

 

Conclusion: Use one disk per machine (and when I speak of disk, I arle of 2 real phisic hard disk in the machine to optimize the flows).

 

A game VM turned only 90% of a real machine, it is better not add anything that would still slow down the whole ^^

I am actually passing an entire SSD to my gaming VM. I am having good results so far:

 

<devices>
    <emulator>/usr/local/sbin/qemu</emulator>
    <disk type='block' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='writeback'/>
      <source dev='/dev/disk/by-id/ata-KINGSTON_SKC400S371T_50026B72680467AD'/>
      <target dev='hdc' bus='sata'/>
      <boot order='1'/>
      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='2'/>
    </disk>

 

You double the access anyway.

 

There is still the problem of the savegame (or any other files created / modified by each machine (example: texture cache etc)).

 

Bad idea

In regards to the save game data, don't most save games go in to either the Steam username folders or the individual VM's Windows documents folders? I'm leaning towards using two physical disks because of read/write speeds, but having a single game folder is enticing but might not be good enough. Thanks for the input so far guys.

For backups, it is probably true, for other files, it is to check.

 

You make the right decision by choosing 2 hard drives, you lose in simplicity and space disk but the comfort of play will be better;)