Unraid Network Drive vs Passed through HDD

[thenonsense]

Hi all,

I've been curious as to how UNRAID manages network drives specifically for its VMs.  I understand that for games a common use case is to build a game server and read/write from that network drive.  However, when UNRAID is the server and a VM is the client querying for that data, does UNRAID shortcut the VM directly to the data as if a hard connection, or does it treat the VM as a separate machine on the network, and send traffic across the router?  

I currently have a 128G cache SSD reserved for my Win10 gaming OS, and a 3TB HDD with a vdisk for games.  No HDD shares use the cache as I've had issues with it in the past and have disabled it to prevent future issues.  I'm installing a 1TB Samsung 850 SSD and I'm trying to figure out if I want to destroy the vdisk and either use the 1TB for cache, or create a new share out of exclusively the 1TB.  I don't want to use the 1Tb as a share if UNRAID will treat the VM as a separate machine, because then my SSD will be throttled by my network.  

 

BTW, if anyone believes dumping it in the cache is the best strategy, I'd appreciate any config/mover frequency tips, because I tried to use the 128GB as a general cache before and could not for the life of me decide how to best set it up.

[JonathanM]

Just now, thenonsense said:

However, when UNRAID is the server and a VM is the client querying for that data, does UNRAID shortcut the VM directly to the data as if a hard connection, or does it treat the VM as a separate machine on the network, and send traffic across the router?

Neither, the VM is a separate machine on the network, but unraid routes the traffic internally if you use the virtio network adapter.

[thenonsense]

Thanks jonathanm, glad to hear it's an internal route.  I'll put my games on network shares then.  The only thing left to figure out is how to best use the 1TB.

[tdallen]

A common strategy would be to run the VM from the 1TB SSD, and leave the SSD outside the array, mounting it via the Unassigned Devices plugin.

[thenonsense]

@tdallen I considered this, but this isn't the only machine I game on.  It isn't even the only gaming VM.  My girlfriend is also on the platform.  Because of this, I'd like some way to make this into an efficient server rather than just a passthrough.  Though passthrough has some merits, I don't think the speed and Samsung's Magician software are worth sacrificing the benefit of a cache/share