VM for storage

[DJ Nuck Chorris]

I have a Dell R710 with 6x500GB WD Enterprise storage drives in Raid 10 on the Perc6i with battery backup. I have several VM's set up.

• Windows Server 2016 for DHCP, AD, and DNS
• Windows 10 for Milestone Xprotect surveillance server
• Windows 10 for a Teamspeak music bot
• Ubuntu 17 for a CS:GO server
• Ubuntu 17 for a Rust Server

I am needing to add a VM that will handle storage for a plex server as well as serve as general NAS storage. I have considered FreeNas but I am running RAID and don't want to stray from that.

Possibly another Ubuntu server with Samba installed? 

 

Your opinions are much appreciated,

Nuck

[Brian Furious]

I'd like to know why would you create a VM for every thing you want?

 

Like c'mon is that necessary to run CS:GO and Rust on different VMs? Waste of resources

[Sir Asvald]

6 minutes ago, Brian Furious said:

I'd like to know why would you create a VM for every thing you want?

 

Like c'mon is that necessary to run CS:GO and Rust on different VMs? Waste of resources

Not good to have 2 game servers on a single server. It could cause loading issues. 

[Brian Furious]

Just now, Abdul201588 said:

Not good to have 2 game servers on a single server. It could cause loading issues. 

I don't get this. Having 2 gameservers on 2 different servers can work better ok, but we talk about 1 SERVER and 2 VMs which is a different question. VMs share resources at the same way so the CPU load will have the same workload in 1 VM or 2 diffierent ones. You just install Linux twice instead of just assigning different game ports and have 1VM but well it's your server you do whatever you want

[Sir Asvald]

Just now, Brian Furious said:

I don't get this. Having 2 gameservers on 2 different servers can work better ok, but we talk about 1 SERVER and 2 VMs which is a different question. VMs share resources at the same way so the CPU load will have the same workload in 1 VM or 2 diffierent ones. You just install Linux twice instead of just assigning different game ports and have 1VM but well it's your server you do whatever you want

I'm not sure if you understood what I said. Having 2 game servers on 1 VM is not good. It'l take more resources as more players join each server. For example, if CS:GO had 50 players and rust have 100+ the VM will use a lot of memory. If you have 2 VMs and each run the game servers separately, and you load balance, the resources will be low

[DJ Nuck Chorris]

With VM's I can allocate certain cores of the two physical processors as needed, and game servers honestly are very single-threaded. I made sure to specify that the two game servers get different physical cores in ESXi, and i haven't had any issues. Containerizing all of my servers makes backup easy and snapshots are easy to backup and duplicate when I spin a new VM. 

 

Back to the original topic. I'm looking at running CentOS now with a simple NFS or iSCSI share. Anyone have experiece with this? 

[Brian Furious]

Maybe someone can clarify me this things. 

 

Let's consider 2 VMs:

 

1 VM: CSGO 50 players = 1GB RAM usage

1 VM: Rust 100+ players = 3GB RAM usage

 

total physical RAM usage: 4GB

 

If you assign 8GB RAM to just 1 VM, how would it use less resorce in 2 VMs? That would be a miracle

[DJ Nuck Chorris]

Just now, Brian Furious said:

Maybe someone can clarify me this things. 

 

Let's consider 2 VMs:

 

1 VM: CSGO 50 players = 1GB RAM usage

1 VM: Rust 100+ players = 3GB RAM usage

 

total physical RAM usage: 4GB

 

If you assign 8GB RAM to just 1 VM, how would it use less resorce in 2 VMs? That would be a miracle

Honestly you're right in the sense that running everything on one VM would me more resource-efficient. But resources isn't really my issue, as I've got 48GB of RAM in the server. VM's are a lot easier to manage. 

Case 1: The CS:GO server gets pegged CPU and locks up for some reason. If the Rust server is on the same VM, it locks up too. If the CS:GO Server runs out of disk space or a memory leak leads to a lockup, the rust server is down too. 

Case 2: The CS:GO server gets pegged CPU and locks up for some reason. The Rust server is on a separate VM running on different cores. CSGO goes down, Rust has no problems. 

[Brian Furious]

5 minutes ago, DJ Nuck Chorris said:

Honestly you're right in the sense that running everything on one VM would me more resource-efficient. But resources isn't really my issue, as I've got 48GB of RAM in the server. VM's are a lot easier to manage. 

Case 1: The CS:GO server gets pegged CPU and locks up for some reason. If the Rust server is on the same VM, it locks up too. If the CS:GO Server runs out of disk space or a memory leak leads to a lockup, the rust server is down too. 

Case 2: The CS:GO server gets pegged CPU and locks up for some reason. The Rust server is on a separate VM running on different cores. CSGO goes down, Rust has no problems. 

You are right. It's some kind of rendundency. I used to have an agent running on a VM which would start back a server to another vm if it crashes to another. That was cool

[leadeater]

9 hours ago, Brian Furious said:

Maybe someone can clarify me this things. 

 

Let's consider 2 VMs:

 

1 VM: CSGO 50 players = 1GB RAM usage

1 VM: Rust 100+ players = 3GB RAM usage

 

total physical RAM usage: 4GB

 

If you assign 8GB RAM to just 1 VM, how would it use less resorce in 2 VMs? That would be a miracle

It's more about not letting one game server be able to overun the resources of the system. With 2 VMs you can limit the resources so if something goes wrong like a memory leak or an annoying person tries to take down the server the other one isn't effected as much or at all.

 

Running more VMs than you should is also bad though, no matter how small a VM is or little work it does the hypervisor still has to schedule CPU time for each and every VM so the overhead gets worse and VMs start to experience CPU wait which directly effect performance i.e. performance loss.

[Jarsky]

Having run a number of game servers (used to have a community with ~20 servers), its generally better to sandbox them somewhat. 

If theyre running on the same VM then they'll be competing for the same CPU time. 

 

I used to run about 4-5 CS servers on 1 VM, but then TF2, Minecraft, Rust, would have their own VM's, as well as my PUG/SCRIM servers as they had a Linux kernel tuned to 1000Hz. 

 

During server patching, you don't have to worry so much either about compatibility between so many games.

With the VM's being sandboxes, any issues with that VM will only affect a small handful of game servers

Its easier to rebuild all the dependencies for a single game in a catastrophic VM failure.