Use your NAS as a Steam Library - TrueNAS + iSCSI Basics

out in my garage i have a rack that is quite literally full of servers and the number one question that i get in the comments is what do i actually use all of those for mostly my home lab is for experimentation be it with different configurations for file storage or virtualization or getting into some more complex services like vdi with my cloud gaming server okay but what are some practical uses for that much hardware today i'm going to show you how to download your entire games library and play them from your gaming pc with all the files hosted on a network storage server best of all there's no funny network configuration or applications refusing to work as your pc will see this as just another local hard drive so sit back relax grab a beer and let's get started today's video is brought to you by anker and the nanopro 20 watt usbc charger the only thing worse than forgetting to charge your phone is realizing it'll take hours with the adapter that came with it the nanopro features power iq3 anchors universally compatible quick charge technology so you can power up your devices and move on with your day with more and more phones opting to not include a charger you're free to choose one that works for you and all of your devices go from a stone cold phone to 50 battery in as little as 26 minutes and at half the size of a standard iphone 20 watt charger the nanopro is easy to travel with and save space when plugged into an outlet plus with anker's active shield safety technology power output and temperature are continuously monitored to protect your connected devices check out the anker nano pro by following the link down in the video description charge it fast make it last and thanks to anker for sponsoring today's video welcome back to craft computing everyone as always i'm jeff out in my server rack i have well over 100 terabytes of usable space and only about half of it is currently being used meanwhile the ssds on my desktops are constantly running out of space meaning i have to keep buying ssds knowing full well i have about 50 terabytes free just about 50 feet away from me that is exactly the problem we're going to try and solve today utilizing the storage in my network rack and allowing my desktops to see it as if it were just another local storage disk but with all the benefits that zfs and trunast bring to the table while solid-state drives continue to get cheaper and cheaper hard drives do still rule the roost when it comes to capacity per dollar especially when you look into used enterprise disks and throw enough spinning drives together you'd actually be surprised at the speed you can get out of them compared to ssds now obviously we're not talking 8 000 megabytes per second like you'd expect from a top of the line gen 4 nvme drive but i have seen one gigabyte per second with low latency out of an array of spinning rust starting to push the limits of the network between you and your server now the reason i have so much storage is mainly due to editing these videos that you all continue to watch but there is a lot more on my truenow server than just video of me swearing at getting a line wrong for the ninth time in a row as much as i love having physical media i have my entire dvd and blu-ray collection ripped onto plex consuming nearly 7 terabytes on its own i also have copies of most physical software media i've collected over the years taking up another couple terabytes in their own right but while i'm using nearly 50 terabytes of space on my server that leaves another 50 terabytes free for the taking and while these videos i make aren't getting any smaller neither are the call of duty's hitmans or flight simulators of the world now if you're like me i'm sure you have tried creating a windows share on your file server and hosting your steam library as a mapped network drive while this does work sometimes you'll actually run into limitations both with the file system used as well as how windows handles network attached storage most windows shares from linux based servers are actually running either ext or zfs file systems which differ greatly from windows ntfs the long explanation is much too boring to get into here but the short version is windows games and applications expect to be able to read and write data in a very specific way and don't like it when things don't work the way it expects windows network shares are hosted using the smb protocol often referred to as samba and windows does not look at this the same way that it does a local disk while any file stored on your local drive is accessed via the drive letter and the file path for example c program files steam smb shares are just a little different while an smb share can be accessed via its mounted drive letter more often than not by windows it's addressed via its unc path so instead of z steam library it would be seen from windows as true now server craft nx71205 steam library this confuses and angers most windows applications resulting in a ton of bugs crashes or in some cases even a refusal to work at all luckily there is a way to view network storage as just another disk on your local pc and it's through a protocol known as iscsi instead of using network sharing protocols and foreign file systems iscsi lets you share a block of storage from a network file server and format it using a native file system like ntfs in windows or apfs in mac best of all you can also take advantage of your file server's features when it comes to disk management like snapshots or even deduplication in zfs there's also less overhead on both the host and client system when using iscsi versus traditional network storage since my home file servers are all running truenas that's what i'm going to be configuring today as the host but iscsi is an open protocol and has hosting and client options available for just about every os and hardware spec you can imagine so think of this more as an introduction to the technology rather than the be all and all guide there is one downside to iscsi that i haven't mentioned yet and it may be a deal breaker for some which is why i'm giving you it before the tutorial and that's that iscsi is meant to be accessed by a single client pc only think of an iscsi drive as just another drive plugged into your pc if i were to take that hard drive out and put it into another pc none of your permissions or settings will carry over using iscsi you're not going to be able to host a single steam library on a file server and then share that file out to every computer on your network each client will still need its own iscsi drive configured and will need to download their games library on their own now there is a way to save space and only keep a single copy of the data when you've actually downloaded two separate copies of the game into two separate iscsi drives but deduplication is a subject for another time so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss that one with all that out of the way let's get your new iscsi drive set up and running the server for today's video is going to be the hp dl80 gen 9 that i reviewed just a couple of months ago and if you want to check out the hardware in that video you can click right up here the long and short of it is it has 20 cores and 40 threads on two e5 2660 v3 cpus and 64 gigabytes of ddr4 memory as for the hard drives i installed all of my seagate constellation es2 3 terabyte drives into here so i have 12 of them in total however i'm only going to be setting up an array with four of those disks for today's video to start out go ahead and open up your truenow server head over to your storage tab and then go down to pools now i'm assuming if you're adding this to an existing truenow server you already have your pool set up if not i also have a tutorial for installing truenas and again you can click right up there find the storage pool you want to add your iscsi disk to i'm going to go to the three dot menu over to the right hand side and i'm going to say add zval give your z vol a name in this case i'm going to name mine steam dash library under size of the z vault you need to define what the maximum space you're going to allow to this volume will be and in my case i'm going to say 3 terabytes now note this won't actually consume 3 terabytes of data right now this is just the max size the volume can grow to under compression level i'm going to select lz4 and then i'm going to check the sparse box right here and that will allow the volume to grow into the maximum size and if everything looks good go ahead and click on submit next we'll need to set up the iscsi share itself and that is very simple to do go down to the sharing tab and click on block share and then in parentheses iscsi the easiest way to configure an iscsi share is using the built-in wizard which you can find right up here in the top right of the window so go ahead and click on the wizard button under name i'm going to name this again steam dash library under extent type select device and then the device we want is the steam library z-vol that we just set up under sharing platform i prefer to go with modern os with four kilobyte block sizes go ahead and click on next under portal we're going to select the network interface that truenast listens for iscsi connections on so click on portal and go down to create new under the ip address drop down go ahead and select the quad zeros which will allow trunas to listen on any network device and just leave the port settings at 3260 which is the default iscsi port and go ahead and click on next under initiator you'll set up which clients are allowed to connect to the iscsi share either via hostname via ip address or even a range of ip addresses by leaving this blank truenast will let any client connect as this is only a games library i'm leaving security pretty lacks here but do take care to lock this down if you're hosting any files of consequence and if everything looks good go ahead and click on next and then click on submit and finally the last thing to do is actually enable the iscsi service and that is done by scrolling down to the services tab clicking on that scrolling down to iscsi and enable the service you'll also want to check the box that says start automatically so the share starts up when the server starts up and with that done we can move on over to the pc side of the setup for this demo i'm going to show off connecting to windows 10 but again iscsi is an open protocol so any pc in the last 20 years is likely able to connect with no issues if you need instructions for your particular os google is going to be your friend here under windows the application we need is baked into most installs and it is called the iscsi initiator so i'm going to type in iscsi is the initiator and iscsi does require a service to be running and the first time you run the initiator it will ask you if you would like the service to start every single time so i'm going to click on yes since we set up our target with non-authenticated access all we have to do is type in the target ip address so in this case it is 10.0.0.162 and i'm going to say quick connect right there we can see our steam library iscsi drive and i'm going to click on done now that the steam library is connected we're pretty much good to go except we're not as you'll notice under my pc there's no hard drive showing up here yet and that's because all we've done is connect to the block storage of our network share we actually haven't defined what a partition or a file system is for this system yet so let's go ahead and do that now to do that you'll want to head on down to the start menu and search for disk management and windows lets us know that we have a new disk installed that is ready to initialize so we're going to go ahead and give that a gpt partition table click ok and right here you can see a blank three terabyte drive i'm going to right click on that go to new simple volume click on next then next again to accept the default size and this will get a default drive letter of e and that works just fine for me i'm going to click on next and we're going to format this with ntfs and i'm going to give it a volume name of steam library and click on next and finish and just as easy as that we have a brand new drive now showing up under my pc here's our e drive called steam library with a usable three terabytes of space on board and the best thing of all this is showing up as a local disk not a network share for those interested this is how a network share normally shows up under windows you can see that even though this does have a drive letter of z it shows up as a network location instead of a local drive the problem with that again is how windows addresses files that are on that disk one potential downside to this configuration is going to be speed as instead of connecting to storage over a pci express interface that's capable of thousands of megabytes per second you're connecting over network so you have to work within those limitations if you have a 10 gigabit connection to your local network that can easily achieve speeds about twice as fast as a sata ssd or around 940 megabytes per second however on one gigabit you'll have a max throughput of around 92 megabytes per second now that may not sound great but keep in mind if you're still running your games library off of a spinning drive on your local pc you're likely not going to notice a difference anyway as most spinning drives struggle to hit over 100 megabytes per second transfer speeds but let's go ahead and test what kind of speeds we'll see over a one gigabit and 10 gigabit connection so i'm running crystaldisc mark on my z drive and you can see we're maxing out at around 88 megabytes per second in read speeds and there we go we got 88 and 141 megabytes per second read in right respectively with our 4k non-sequential coming in at pretty good scores as well at 57 and 60. as you can see the jump to 10 gigabit is where things start to really get fun as we can finally take advantage of some of those high-end zfs features like the fact that it reads and writes all of its data directly from ram so our speeds are well and above faster what four spinning drives should be capable of at 971 megabytes per second read and 1130 megabytes per second right so we have the drive setup but how do you actually store your games on it well again it's as simple as using this as a local drive so inside of steam we're going to go to system settings go down to downloads and then click on steam library folders this will open a window that looks kind of like this and you can see the little plus sign right there go ahead and click on that i'm going to select the e drive which is our steam library i'm going to say new folder and call it steam library and then hit select with that set up if i go to my steam library tab and go to the settings cog i can set this to my default folder with that selected as the default folder anytime i go to install a game on steam it will automatically install it onto my e drive which is my iscsi steam library now just as a reminder if you want to set up multiple iscsi drives you certainly can but each system will have to have its own isazy connection and its own z vault setup on truenas now you're not going to be able to share your games library as in a single folder with multiple systems at the same time however each system can have their own z-vol and their own iscsi connection and save their own games library inside of truenas but again there is a way to save on space if you have multiple copies of the same game on multiple iscsi drives and that is through zfs deduplication and that's going to be the subject of an upcoming video so make sure you subscribe so you don't miss that one if you like this one you know what to do hit that thumbs up button and subscribe to craft computing if you haven't done so already follow me on twitter at craft computing to keep up with daily shenanigans like this and if you like the content you see on this channel and want to help support me in what i do head on over to craft computing.store grab yourself a pike glass hoodie or t-shirt thank you all so much for watching this one and as always i will see you in the next video i don't know why i'm clinking glasses with this one because that was awful cheers guys beer for today is going to catch some of you off guard it is from 49th state brewing up in alaska it is the thundershock oyster pale ale now oyster stouts are a thing and they are exactly what you think they are they are a stout that is made with oysters so this is a pale ale that's made with oysters thank you alaska now i've had a number of oyster stouts in my day but i cannot think of a time that i have had an oyster ipa so here goes nothing so this did get a little bit of a head on it but then it died down very quickly and what's left is just like a single layer of bubbles across the top of the beer this is definitely not clear but it's also not opaque this is not like a hazy in appearance you can see through it it's just a little bit murky which when i think of seafood i always equate murky with a sign of quality well now that is certainly a beer you know on the nose i'm getting kind of a traditional northwest hop profile think like cascade willamette or chinook hops you know quintessential oregon and washington based hops there's nothing really off-putting about this at all until you start to drink it super super super dry like think lemons and salt water dry uh now the brininess the the saltiness of this drink is really no surprise seeing as how it is made with oysters but that is not a flavor that's gonna work for everyone i don't even know that it works for me oysters may not seem like the most logical ingredient for a beer they do work inside stouts especially when you get like a thick imperial stout like something in the 11.5 or higher range those are typically stouts that need a little bit of balance to counteract the sweetness and the roastiness of the dark malt and so you add a little bit of salt and what you're left with is a very pleasant drink think something in the line of salted caramel but with an ipa that is already sitting on the bitter side of things especially with some northwest hops that are very vegetal very plant-like in their their flavor profile adding salt and a little bit of lemon to the top of that boy i just don't know that it works that well i'm still gonna drink it but i don't have to be happy about it oh do not take a big drink of this one i'm going to get some water a little bit extra here that salt now is sitting right at the top of my throat and it's making me like want to cough and sneeze all at the same time if this were an oyster stout i'd probably be enjoying it nope nope don't like this nope

Channel: Craft Computing

Views: 109,729

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Id: 9JL-RVUHj6o

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021