Plex & Storage Question.

[KenJones61]

First, a bit of background. I have a Synology 4 bay NAS, a dedicated Plex server, and a host of other 1 liter boxes and Pi's. I'm running out of room in the fully populated NAS. I could "punt" and install larger drives, but I don't want to be tied to a proprietary system. I've been thinking about using TrueNAS to build out a larger system I can repair. I was also thinking about Proxmox to consolidate my stack of other computers each running various OSes and for various functions. I've been watching videos and reading. I found a good deal on a dual Xeon system, i.e. the total system was just a little bit more than one of the CPUs new. It's coming soon and I'm waiting for the "gotcha" that is bound to happen. I have my fingers crossed.

Then a thought struck me. I'm going to eventually host Plex on the Proxmox machine and Proxmox can host ZFS drive pools, would it make sense to build a storage pool specifically for the Plex machine ( I have to move around 28Tb plus have room for more ) and leave the rest of my data (non-Plex) on the Synology? I'd be pushing that data to offline drives for backup just like I do now. I don't access any of the Plex media at any time other than maintaining the libraries.

I'll need to access it via SMB and from other VMs/containers, like manually uploading video from my desktop and running services like Tdarr, filebot, etc. I'll be able to get away with a much smaller box for my other NAS functions when the Synology eventually goes down.

Am I thinking along the right lines?

 

[bobmc]

A lot of people run a setup very much along the same lines. The major decision is if you run your SMB shares and storage natively or under TrueNAS.

If you want to run TrueNAS then you do really want to give TrueNAS direct access to the drives and this usually means you need two storage controllers, one dedicated to TrueNAS and one for Proxmox to provide separate storage for the OS and VM's (note that for best results your VM storage really needs to be on prosumer or enterprise grade SSD/Nvme - budget SSD drives should be avoided) You then create SMB shares on TrueNAS which can be accessed by your Plex server and other VM's and physical clients as required - this is pretty much what you have running now consolidated into one box.

The alternative approach would be to create ZFS pools on the host and then use Samba to provide SMB shares - either directly on the host or via a dedicated container or VM. This has less overhead and arguably gives you a more flexible storage configuration but it does require more direct management to get it set up and working.

 

[Dunuin]

In addition to a HBA card for the TrueNAS VM, you probably also want a GPU you can passthrough into the Plex VM for hardware accelerated encoding. so you want two GPUs in that server. One for the host and one for plex.

 

[KenJones61]

Thanks for the replies!

I got the unit in and it is as was described. A Dell T7810 with two Xeon E5-2690 v4 and 128Mb, no drives or OS. All of the diagnostics say everything is healthy. The only issue with it for what I'm wanting to do is the lack of drive mounts: 2 regular and one in the 5.25" bay. There are 6 SATA ports, tho? Curious. A little research reveals the motherboard is proprietary which means the mounting holes and all/most of the connectors will have to be custom if I wanted to move to a different case.

There are no Nvme slots, so would a PCIe multi-Nvme card work in Proxmox? Here's what I'm thinking now. A small SSD for Proxmox install, ISOs, etc. A 4-bay Nvme card for the VM pool. Use the 3 3.5" slots for the Plex media (which doesn't need to be anything other than striped, if even that, as the data doesn't change and a copy is already in a backup.)

I get that I want a better GPU than the K620 that came with it, but do I need two? This can't be run headless? I only need a better card for when I need to transcode.

Thanks again!

 

[Dunuin]

Depends on the Motherboard, GPU and BIOS. Some GPUs won't work with passthrough if they were initialized while starting the server. Here it help to have 2 GPUs, so you can passthrough the secondary GPU that wasn't initialized. Some motherboards/BIOS want an GPU all the time, so you can't steal the only GPU the Host got, to pass it through into a VM.
Have a look if the BMC comes with a onboard GPU that you could set in BIOS as your primary GPU. BIOS often lets you choose if you want to boot with the onboard GPU of the BMC or a PCIe GPU.