Multiple Plex Servers and Management

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
1

Server Version#: 1.13.5.5332
Player Version#: Any

Hey all, I’ve been a Plex member for a long time and love the service. I am looking for some guidance on the backend of Plex. I run x5 Plex servers that are hosted on VMware vSphere 6.5. I have a movie library of over 3000+ titles and 500+ tv shows. I find myself needing to rebuild my Plex servers around every 6 months or so because of various reasons like corruption etc. My question is this. Is it possible to host a shared location (on an NFS Share) for the ‘/var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Media/localhost’ location and all the Plex servers use that content?

A single server is using almost 200GB in storage if I could have them all use a common share I wouldn’t be losing so much storage. I was thinking of something along the lines of a symbolic link redirected to a mounted nfs folder.

2

Succinctly: No.

The database is SQLite3. It does not support the required level of locking. SQLite3 was chosen because PMS is not intended to to be a multi-host server (e.g. to support a cluster of servers) from a centralized database. It was written as one server / host architecture.

A more viable solution would be to create a tar.gz of the ./Library directory, retaining the last N months of backups. PMS already does this when enabled in Settings - Server - Scheduled Tasks

3

I had done something similar with XBMC and got it working. Having it connect to a centralized database. I also hacked the motherboard bios and had it boot from iSCSI (Reflashed an intel nic). It was done more as an experiment. Its probably not worth it. If it were to blow up then all of your servers would go down.

I too have an ESX cluster running about 6-8 Synology VMs that run Plex and various other things. I have about 100TB of storage.

Ill show you mine if you show me yours :D.

Cheers,

4

Thanks for the reply! :slight_smile: I have 12 blades running with 60TB of Synology storage. I’m running everything on NFS and vSAN. The other thing I’m trying to figure out is how to clone an existing Plex server without rebuilding the Plex Library.

5

Cloning is trivial in Linux. Absolutely trivial.

  1. Create the same media mounts on the dest as the clone source.
  2. Stop PMS on Source system
  3. Tarball the ./Library diretory
  4. Install and start PMS one time on the dest host
  5. Delete its existing ./Library directory
  6. Untar the tarball in proper position
  7. Adjust ownership
  8. Edit Preferneces.xml and remove the UUID strings which identify the server and friendly name (need new anyway).
  9. Start
  10. Claim
6

Thank you! I’ll give that a shot!

7

If you go to the server-linux-tips tag, you’ll find all the tips I have for tasks such as this.

8

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