Sharing a Disk Between VM's?

[potts202p]

After (literally) months of trying to get a GPU to work with my VM's I have finally managed to do it.

I now have two VMs that each run their own GPU and can use them as expected. My main purpose for this was for remote gaming as my partner has a rather slow 2012 PC that can barely keep up with the oldest titles.

Now we can play games together- except one thing; we need to download the same copy of the game we want to play. This could mean potentially hundreds of gigs for a single game, space on my Gen4 NvME is at a premium.

Is it possible to download the game on a shared partition that both PC's can share?

 

[oguz]

hi,

have you thought about using network shared storage like NFS or SMB/CIFS for this?
you can download anything in the share, mount it in the VM and use it from there. but i'm not sure if this will work for your setup (network shares are typically slower than disk i/o)

Is it possible to download the game on a shared partition that both PC's can share?

yes, also possible. you could passthrough a disk device the same way you do with the GPU. and then the disk will be accessible from the VMs.

 

[potts202p]

You are correct, I doubt that a network storage solution would be my ideal solution, However it may be a good step in the right direction until I find that holy grail solution. My main concern would by the disk mounting on both machines and writing at one time. The solution I am looking at is making their shared drive read only - allowing the game to save all local data on the local machines only. I am not sure if this is a resonable solution or not - but I'm just brainstorming at this point.