I’m slowly building a Plex Rig, but I’m stuck on how I want to install the OS(s).
Rig Specs:
2x Xeon E5 2680v2
128GB RAM
2x400GB Enterprise SSD’s
Quadro P2000
24TB Storage HDDs
I was thinking of using ESXI and installing the following: Windows 10 VM for the Plex server, and either FreeNAS or Unraid for a NAS. Was leaning more towards unRAID since it can scale it’s capacity much easier.
I’m going with Windows 10 VM since I have the Quado P2000 GPU and want to hardware transcode with it. My biggest worry is that this will not work in a Win10 VM. Is this possible with Windows 10 in a VM under ESXI?
or
Should I keep it simple and keep this server as a dedicated PLEX server, and for the “NAS”, create a Windows Shared Drive.
I’ve had issues with the P2000 under a Windows VM on unRAID. No matter what Windows Version (7, 10 oder Server '16) it sometimes worked pretty well and other times just loaded forever. I had a HDMI Dummy so that should’nt be the problem. Tried with multiple drivers - nope. It just wasn’t stable anough so i gave up on it. the only VM that worked great was a Linux VM but nvidia (or Plex idk) doesnt dupport decoding yet.
I’m thinking about leaving unRaid because of the “slow” disk speed it has. Leaning towards FreeNAS but i would like to use a Windows VM for HW in Plex. Heard about Esxi but i dunno anything about it.
FreeNAS on ESXi is a minefield and not recommended. You can run VMs in FreeNAS but they don’t run well on the ZFS filesystem, so you’d want to take extra steps to beef up FreeNAS’ performance much higher than normal to compensate (and looking into things like an l2arc on an SSD, etc).
What issues does FreeNAS have on ESXi? As part of my transition away from FreeNAS, I virtualized it and ran it within ESXi for months with zero issues (OK, I did have one issue in that when I virtualized it the ethernet card had a different name so I have to edit the config manually to correct the name so I could reach it).
Maybe you are talking about its access to disks? For that I used PCI passthrough to give FN the HBA in needed to see the disks.
I am running FreeNAS (FreeNAS-11.2-RELEASE-U1) on ESXi (6.7.0 (Build 8169922)) right now and have never had any issues with it (other than me being stupid). Key thing, as @gbooker02 already pointed out, is passing the disks to FreeNAS via PCI passthrough since it really, really, really wants direct access to the disks. As long as you pass the disks, you should be able to just transfer the disks to another system and boot/re-install FreeNAS in case something goes wrong on your ESXi host.
To be clear: I do NOT have any critical data on my ESXi FreeNAS. It just contains rips that are waiting to be transcoded/subtitled. If something does eventually go wrong or I mess it up again, I simply re-rip the respective blu-rays and call it a day. Nevertheless, if you care about your data, you (should) keep it in several places anyways. So your ESXi FreeNAS breaking should not really result in anything but stress, costs and wasted time.
