It would be really appreciated if PMS can run in a redundant / failover mode. So we can load balance the PMS (when more then 1 available) or set it up as a (hot standby), if one system fails, the other takes over.
If possible in another way, please explain how to do...
Holy smokes Batman, just how much of your city's population are you sharing your server with? Plex is a *consumer* product for personal use, not a high-availability enterprise solution with support for massive concurrency and "five nines" uptime guarantee. If you really have 5+ people in your home who all want to transcode all at once, it's up to you to beef up your hardware situation.
If you need to load balance your media storage, then by all means buy as many RAID/NAS devices as you need, and spread your media across different shares to split the I/O.
Need tons of transcoding? Then buy an enterprise-level server machine with 16+ CPUs that can serve your entire household with a single PMS server. Or buy a separate machine to install PMS on per user (can still share the same media, see suggestion for RAID/NAS above).
Need redundancy? Then keep an additional server on "standby" connected to the same RAID/NAS. If your PMS machine dies (omg, once every few years!), you'll have all of 2 minutes of downtime while you connect to the new server.
For the life of me, the concept of needing or even wanting a load-balanced and/or redundant PMS is... huh? RAID/NAS takes care of securing media against loss and aiding with I/O concurrency, while vertical or horizontal scaling of the PMS machine(s) takes care of transcoding concurrency. I swear, it sounds like you're asking how to support the 10,000 concurrent users you've gained by opening your PMS to the public.....?
Heh, and now for the sensible possibility - you're more worried about losing the PMS database and having to start the database from scratch if/when you lose the PMS server. In that case, all you need to do is take regular backups of the PMS directory. See http://wiki.plexapp.com/index.php/PlexNine_Tips_and_Tricks#Moving_a_Database_from_one_Server_to_another for the location of the directory to backup on your OS flavour. While the reinitialization process for restoring from backup may not be as instant and friendly as having a standby ready to go, it is possible. Do keep in mind this *is* an at-home consumer product. If your household can't live without Plex for an hour while you restore from backup, that's just pretty sad. ;)
If you need to have this level of reliability I highly suggest simply running the plex server in a VM, and having the actual Media files on some kind of shared storage like a NAS... Then if you need to bring the VM up on new hardware it is trivial.
It is actually not that sad, at home we can certainly live with some outage now and then, but with a VM that can indeed be easily solved.
The reason for me for asking how to run it in a load balanced mode is because we use it also in a film, art & design community where people create, edit, etc. eg. movies, concerts, etc. watch those from others and share comments on how to be a better director/editor/etc. This can sometimes cause a load on the server where transcoding becomes a bottleneck. I was just curious how this could be solved (to run multiple PMS with one synced database or any other load balanced option).
Just buying new hardware is not the solution for our community (which is not a commercial entity for sure). As we don't have the funds to do so and don't want to pay premium price on hardware or some 5 nine's software solution, we were looking at a solution to run it on left-over desktops/servers from the people in the community.
Hope you follow the idea here...
Separate the libraries among more than one server? That is all I could suggest.
PMS is not designed for "communities" it is designed for friends and family's..
If you want to scale it up to that size it has to be solved with hardware.
Try this. Put your 'local application data' on a shared cluster drive. Then install Plex on both nodes (making sure to chose the same folder for your local data on both). Add the Plex App as a startup in the cluster manager so it only runs when the drives are present.
I see no reason why this would not work. The Plex app on the OS drive and the data and media on cluster drives.
This would be great if Plex cloud is used a a redundancy for a local PMS. If our local server is damage/stolen or we are traveling, we can use the Flex cloud. If we are at home, a local instance of PMS would be preferred. Two servers, same library. It is not about being enterprise, it is about having being prepared to be mobile while preferring local streaming when possible.
