Gaming from a NAS storage

[Trikoo]

imagine the situation of a gaming lounge, where everyone is accessing the same game from the NAS, is it possible ?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Lots of programs like exclusive access to storage, so this might be annoying and need some tweaking. You will either need to do a good amount of testing, or do something like iscsi + dedup for minimizing storage space usage. 

 

Also lots of game and programs don't like running from smb shares, so you would need to use iscsi.

[Archer42]

Really interesting way to do it is lvm volume + a bunch of thin snapshots, one for each computer.

This will mean that each computer gets its own disk and then only changes to base volume are stored for each such snapshot.

Then obviously iscsi to connect it to each computer.

 

Not sure how it will practically work for games though, large updates might cause issues and require applying them to base volume to avoid wasting a bunch of space and doing it for each computer. And obviously saves along with any configuration data have to somehow be stored separately, possibly locally, so that deleting/recreating snapshots would not delete them.

 

Combined with performance considerations it might be not worth the trouble. Local storage might ultimately be cheaper and more convenient.

[Pixel5]

given that storage space is cheap as hell this is not worth the effort, the 10Gbe network you need to make this at all practical would cost you more then getting an extra HDD for each computer.

[Nick7]

It's possible.

But, you need iSCSI, and each client needs it's own 'virtual disk'.

What would help you is using ZFS with deduplication, as most of data would be deduplicated.

You do want to have 10G for NAS itself, while 1G is enough for clients, though more would be preferable.