Best practice to use a Synology NAS as storage for Plex running on Proxmox?

[Bravestarr]

Hi!

I recently build a custom pc that is now my proxmox server with a small NVME. I already own a Synology NAS with a few TBs. How can I use the storage of the Synology NAS for proxmox? NFS? SMB? I already created a shared folder for backups over NFS. Works. I created another shared folder where my movies and tv shows are on my synology nas. But it seems I can't use this storage directly in proxmox vms. I tried to mount nfs directly but then I stopped: maybe this is wrong and there is an easier way to use Synology NAS as a storage?

 

[alyarb]

This might be a question for reddit /r/plex. Not seeing how Proxmox is involved.

Wherever Plex is running, virtual or not, you will have to mount your network storage to the local system, expressed as some local path, and configure your Plex libraries on those path(s). If its Windows/nix/NFS/CIFS should not make a difference.

Let your operating system handle mounting the share, put an easy local path in your Plex config.

 

[Bravestarr]

Okay, then ignore the "Plex" part. How do LXC or VMs gain access to the Synology NAS? So it is not possible to use the "Storage" of Proxmox as a passthrough? I need to mount the Synology Paths via SMB/NFS on the os level?

 

[alyarb]

Network storage should be mounted at the layer you wish to consume it and work with it.

In the PVE GUI, Datacenter -> Storage -> Add -> NFS will mount an NFS share in your Proxmox datacenter.

Datacenter storage is for your virtual infrastructure. Your only interaction with NFS at this layer is for management and provisioning virtual infrastructure objects, not consumption by an application at a higher layer.

Datacenter storage is for creating and working with virtual disks, ISO images, container templates, dumps, etc.

If you mount a NFS share to your PVE Datacenter, you can create a large virtual disk on it, and mount that to your VM or LXC, and use that virtual disk for your Plex store. But it sounds like you already have a Movies\TV library on the NAS, so you need to decide do you want your NAS to host virtual disks, or multimedia files, because you can't go back and forth.

Either the multimedia files are hosted at the physical layer by the NAS at the file level, and is not stored on a virtual disk, or you can host a virtual disk on the NAS and host the multimedia files at the VM layer.

I'm not sure there is a best practice because every situation is different, but for me I would prefer to host files on the NAS and mount the share inside the VM. This way other systems can mount the share and access these files. Also, my gut tells me that virtual disk performance over NFS will be poorer than file-level performance, so in general I would prefer not do any virtual disk or VM-hosting on the NAS.

 

[_gabriel]

proxmox ve is out of scope.
connect to nas using smb.
SMB allow access from multiple machines : physicals, VMs or LXCs

 

[Bravestarr]

Okay. Why not NFS?

 

[alyarb]

NFS and SMB\CIFS both have their strengths. Before you decide on the communication protocol, you should decide how you want your infrastructure to be setup.

If you want your NAS to behave like a NAS, and host multimedia files for your client(s), then you can use either NFS or SMB or both. You should probably connect to it with SMB, for wider interoperability between Windows and Linux clients. It sounds like things are already setup this way, and this is also more aligned with the manufacturer's assumed and intended use case for the NAS.

If you want your NAS to behave like a SAN, and host virtual disks exclusively mounted by your Proxmox host, then you should connect to it with NFS.

Of course, if you want to go this way, and still intend to share your multimedia files on the network, once you create a virtual disk, and it's attached to your VM, and formatted with a file system, files and directories can be shared via NFS or SMB from inside the VM, but you can see how this creates a rather inefficient data flow, and an otherwise larger load on your host, NAS, and switch, compared to native file hosting on the NAS.

 

[Bravestarr]

I went with SMB because I got so many problems with NFS. For example the plex server did not "see" my files in the share but the LCX shell did. With smb it was like two commands and it worked. Thanks!

I used this tutorial: https://atlassc.net/2021/08/10/mount-synology-with-cifs-utils-on-ubuntu