What is the difference in a Container and a Virtual Machine?

There are many things to note, but the main points are that containers are smaller in byte sizes and can be extremely lightweight since they don't need a guest operating system (like Windows 10/Ubuntu) to run. Virtual Machines require more resources because they have an entire operating systems installed. Virtual Machines typically require a minimum number and amount of RAM. For instance, a Windows 10 virtual machine may need a minimum of 2 vCores and 2GB of RAM just for the operating system itself, then additional resources will need to be added to run a game server like Space Engineers. You can allow containers to use the resources of the system as necessary. This allows you to not have to reserve cores/threads/RAM for the container. This is because the more people join the server the more resources they can use to offset the extra work load. If you wish, you can limit the number and amount of RAM and vCores available to your containers.

When to use a container?

In my opinion you should always seek to run a game server in a container whenever possible. This will maximize your system resources to run other applications, virtual machines, or containers.

When is it appropriate to use a virtual machine?

When a container doesn't exist or if you are just straight up more comfortable setting up a virtual machine with a nice easy "Desktop Experience". Space Engineers can be run in a container, but it loses a lot of the functionality that its virtual machine counterpart offers. This is why I run Space Engineers on a Windows 10 virtual machine. It's also incredibly easy to do.

Maximizing Game Server Performance

Unraid 6.9 gives us a new ability to really fine tune how well our game servers perform. Unraid 6.9 introduces something very cool called Multiple Pools.

Separate storage for Caching, Virtual Machines, and Containers

One pool allows you to use the same underlying storage to store your VMs and containers. It also provides a cache to store data written to shares. This can cause performance issues in other applications if there is a large copy of a share. This may not be obvious for home users, but it can be more noticeable in multi-user environments and power users.

You can now create multiple storage pools to use for specific functions.

In this link you can learn all about multi pools. This feature is important because we can very easily separate our game servers from our array and from our cache. You can dedicate hardware just for gaming servers. This will make gaming more enjoyable.

Storage allocation

Because it is running Windows 10 as well as the Space Engineers server program, My Space Engineers' virtual machine is stored on a dedicated SSD. This means that the virtual machine can read and write to the drive as much as needed without being hindered by any other virtual machine, container, or application.

For now, all of my gaming containers run in my cache because they are extremely lightweight and there is at most 5 people in one game server at a time. If I wanted to, I could put all containers in their own pools or select ones like Minecraft. My Minecraft server is heavily modified and if my friends were constantly playing Rust on it, there might be performance issues as both servers read and write to the cache quite frequently.

Remote Access to Your Server

Game crashed while you were away Perhaps the game has frozen? Fear not, the community has your back. You can set up a VPN within Unraid OS to access the WebUI from any device, anywhere in the world.

Wireguard is a good choice. OpenVPN can be used as a backup. There are many guides and videos online that will help guide you in setting it up.

Server unreachable via VPN? With Unraid's free service My Servers, you can check if your server online. My Servers allows you to back-up your USB Flash Drive in case of untimely death.
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