I don’t know what category this goes in.
I have needs for TrueNAS VM’s for certain things. However, I’m curious. Can I reliably use a VM as a storage manager?
I am currently trying out using a server as a desktop. I have a Dell PowerEdge R510 with a Nvidia 1660Ti running windows 10 with the AME script having been run, and I want to run some VM’s to have network storage for other projects. Doing this effectively combines a pile of tasks for me, and its not that loud or hot.
What I am curious about is running a VM for personal storage.
So say I have 1 VM for “work” and one vm for “fun”. One VM gets requests for things like a file repository, the “work” drive, and the other handle games, general files, etc. I’d like to be able to access these files on other machines, such as having ONE steam library on a NAS VM, rather than reinstalling games, and just hooking the machine up to the network and loading them that way. This could be the same for all sorts of apps, saving an ungodly amount of space on a ton of other machines.
And then, for safety, I can shut the VM down and “cold store” my data from network access et al.
Is this a good or bad idea?
Bonus is copying one blob file VHD and bam I backed everything up just like that
Is there a reason you want the services so separate but on the same system? You would have much better performance if you just used Windows native system resources for your file needs and just share your desired folders over your network.
If you want to “cold” store your data, I would suggest either building a small low power system you can power on when you want to backup or an external hard drive you can physically connect to your system to back up your files.
I have a “gaming VM” running windows 10 and GPU passthrough with proxmox on a skylake era xeon and it does has acceptable performance. In reality it is basically so I can quickly play satifactory or 7 days to die on my ipad at home when nobody is looking. You wouldn’t necessarily have the frame drops from network streaming I have but comparing apples to apples with the hardware I have access to right now, it still definitely does not compare to a comparable bare metal system running games IMO.
Yes, I am building and testing a potential web 3 solution, to the point of needing to do actual math and start plotting out if my ram kits are peak performance or not.
While windows has some very good tooling for this, I actually don’t know how it works in anything newer than XP. I have a project going to update XP and make it a NAS environment for this reason, but that has been set aside for bigger things.
Basically, I have to be able to dump out versions of both the software, and the repo setup for testing it. I don’t think I’ll expand the VDI’s again, that wasted a lot of space, but to be able to just quick copy paste that into a little historical folder, boot the VM any time, and start the one version of my software that had all the shit wired correctly so I can compare to other newer brokener versions… idk I can’t get a tape archive cheap anymore because some asshole bought 20 LTO3 ones for some stupid video so this was my solution. Happened to work.
I’d like a gaming vm… but I really only play TF2 and tarkov, maybe factorio. Kinda need real HW for tark.