So I’ve been running a Q-nap TS453 NAS with Plex for years and it has been rock solid. My goal is to upgrade a bit and to retire the Qnap as I don’t utilize any function of it other than 1 CIFS share + the Plex pkg. I do however want to add an ESXi server and a home lab. I don’t want multiple appliances, I want “one box to rule them all.” So my plan is to run ESXi 6.5 on a Supermicro SuperServer 5028D-TN4T - MT - Xeon D-1541 2.
My initial thought was to run FreeNAS on a VM and install the Plex Plugin. I’ve heard bad things about Plex on FreeNAS 11. Is there a better solution to virtualize Plex? Should I give it’s own dedicated VM and forego the plugin route? If so, whats your recommendation for platform/OS that will best run Plex as a service? Is there a better option for my storage OS than FreeNAS?
Ideally I’d like to run a few VMs on this box, so I would need whatever virtualized NAS/storage server I’m putting in place to present a datastore back to ESXi
On Plugins, unless it has dramatically gotten better lately (and indications in this forum are that it hasn’t), don’t bother with the FreeNAS plugin mechanism. It’s never worked correctly. If you want to Plex, or any other software, on FreeNAS, create a jail manually and install the package there.
I’m afraid what I have to say on the rest is not going to make many in the FreeBSD community very happy, but it’s the honest truth.
FreeNAS does make a simple NAS appliance that doesn’t require much on part of the user to get up and running. It also have several conveniences which is what attracted me to it in the first place. Now I’m wishing I hadn’t.
Since you are running a hypervisor, you do have the ability to run other VMs for your software. I used to run much of my software in jails on FreeNAS, but over time the extreme difficulty of getting some of them working started to annoy me and I gave up. While I still have FreeNAS on the metal, I’ve eliminated all of my jails and I run everything in docker containers inside Ubuntu running inside bhyve. I mount my media and other directories over SMB, but the configuration databases are on the native filesystem within the VM. Putting databases on a mount is asking for corrupt databases (I’ve experienced it with both SMB and NFS). Also I occasionally have file corruption across the SMB mount which can only be corrected by unmounting the SMB mounts and restarting the service on the FreeNAS side, though this is only about once every few months or so.
I will be migrating to running ESXi on the metal soon and put FreeNAS inside a VM. I will then create an Ubuntu VM with a bigger set of drives and migrate all of my data across to a pool in Ubuntu and then blow away the FreeNAS VM. The complete inability of FreeBSD to have any sensible file system change notification API in the kernel has grated on me for the past several years. That combined with the pain of getting lesser used software to work on FreeBSD where on Ubuntu it is an apt install away has also become annoying (the reason I changed from jails to docker containers). In short, I’ve given up on FreeBSD and I’m going back to ZFS on Ubuntu. I’m only waiting on Ubuntu 18.04 with ZFS on Linux 0.7.4
I have plans similarly to the OP, move my plex server off my nas on to a VM.
I plan to experiment with at least debian and archlinux distros on VM’s before doing anything permanently.
I also need to research what are the best supported/consistently updated linux packages, that ideally support some kind of auto-update mechanism for low ongoing maintenance once put into primary usage.
I’ve done both ESXi and Hyper-V to put my Plex Server on a VM. I switched from ESXi to Hyper-V due to a problem I was having that I thought was related to hardware incompatibility with ESXi. Turns out I was wrong, but since I’ve always been a Windows guy and have little Linux experience, Hyper-V (running on a Windows 10 machine) was just easier to wrap my head around.
It’s been nearly flawless for the past three years, but suddenly, I’ve had some streaming issues with really high bit-rate 1080p content (like 40mb range, most recently Dunkirk). I’m not even attempting 4K yet. After reading on reddit about a guy running Plex in Docker on Unraid, and him saying that he went from barely being able to stream 1 high bitrate 1080p stream to multiple 4k streams on the same hardware, I’m wondering if my Hyper-V setup is the issue.
I figured this fell under ‘Best Practices’ for virtualizing plex, so posted here instead of starting a new thread. Thoughts?
