A few concepts that I need to wrap my head around

[rinzler]

I'm going to apologize in advance for what are probably very elementary questions. Fortunately for you (and for me), I've been able to answer most of my hardware questions just by reading the hardware guide and the FreeNAS for newbies tutorial located on this site. However, I have been unable to find a resource that explains (in concept) how I accomplish what I want to do once I've built (or bought) my FreeNAS machine. If you can point me in the right direction I'm more than happy to read up on it.

Preface:

My initial goal is to have a home server that handles all my Plex & P2P needs. I've already bought an R710 for that which will handle all of my virtualization. Probably just 2-3 Ubuntu virtual machines running on top of esxi? I'm going to have my FreeNAS box on entirely separate hardware.

I'm a linux noob and while I have been playing around with Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 machines on Windows 10 via Hyper-V I still have very limited experience.

Question 1: Where do I mount the FreeNAS server? Do I mount it to the esxi hypervisor as a datastore (isci right?) or do I access it directly from the Ubuntu VM (NFS?) running on top of esxi?

Question 2: Depending on the answer in question 1, how exactly do I do that? Is there a tutorial / youtube video somewhere that explains it in full detail? I'm a slow learner but I'm dedicated so step-by-step instructions are ideal.

Question 3: I'm going to segregate the Plex etc. VM and the P2P machines (so I can segregate P2P traffic via OpenVPN). However, I need both of these machines to have access to the files located on the FreeNAS server.

I'm sure I'll come back with more questions as they come up but thank you very much in advance!

 

[nightshade00013]

You may want to drop using the ESXI as Plex on FreeNAS 9.10 can be installed in a jail as can Transmission with a OpenVPN tunnel.

Plus once FreeNAS 10 hits release which will hopefully be in the next couple months it will be able to work fairly well as a type of hypervisor with Docker and or Bhyve. We are not sure if Plex will continue to be supported under FreeBSD at that point but then it will be simple enough to install Debian or something of the like and run the Linux version under FreeNAS.

Plus with using the FreeNAS jail system it makes linking directories into the jails very easy rather than to have to basically use it as a network share or something else with ESXI. Unless you ABSOLUTELY need ESXI for something that can not be done with FreeNAS in some way you will be better off without it IMHO.

As far as reading I would suggest the stickies about system requirements and then these

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...g-up-transmission-with-openvpn-and-pia.24566/

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...all-plex-in-a-freenas-9-3-jail-updated.19412/

 

[ccssid]

I'm going to apologize in advance for what are probably very elementary questions. Fortunately for you (and for me), I've been able to answer most of my hardware questions just by reading the hardware guide and the freenas for newbies tutorial located on this site. However, I have been unable to find a resource that explains (in concept) how I accomplish what I want to do once I've built (or bought) my freenas machine. If you can point me in the right direction I'm more than happy to read up on it.

Preface:

My initial goal is to have a home server that handles all my Plex & P2P needs. I've already bought an R710 for that which will handle all of my virtualization. Probably just 2-3 Ubuntu virtual machines running on top of esxi? I'm going to have my freenas box on entirely separate hardware.

I'm a linux noob and while I have been playing around with Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 machines on Windows 10 via Hyper-V I still have very limited experience.

Question 1: Where do I mount the freenas server? Do I mount it to the esxi hypervisor as a datastore (isci right?) or do I access it directly from the Ubuntu VM (NFS?) running on top of esxi?

Question 2: Depending on the answer in question 1, how exactly do I do that? Is there a tutorial / youtube video somewhere that explains it in full detail? I'm a slow learner but I'm dedicated so step-by-step instructions are ideal.

Question 3: I'm going to segregate the Plex etc. VM and the P2P machines (so I can segregate P2P traffic via OpenVPN). However, I need both of these machines to have access to the files located on the FreeNAS server.

I'm sure I'll come back with more questions as they come up but thank you very much in advance!

this youtube video may be of some help:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DnUWTliaOY

 

[rinzler]

You may want to drop using the ESXI as Plex on FreeNAS 9.10 can be installed in a jail as can Transmission with a OpenVPN tunnel.

Plus once FreeNAS 10 hits release which will hopefully be in the next couple months it will be able to work fairly well as a type of hypervisor with Docker and or Bhyve. We are not sure if Plex will continue to be supported under FreeBSD at that point but then it will be simple enough to install Debian or something of the like and run the Linux version under FreeNAS.

Plus with using the FreeNAS jail system it makes linking directories into the jails very easy rather than to have to basically use it as a network share or something else with ESXI. Unless you ABSOLUTELY need ESXI for something that can not be done with FreeNAS in some way you will be better off without it IMHO.

As far as reading I would suggest the stickies about system requirements and then these

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...g-up-transmission-with-openvpn-and-pia.24566/

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...all-plex-in-a-freenas-9-3-jail-updated.19412/

Thanks for the reply. The problem with that scenario is I've already purchased a beast of an R710 to handle all of my virtualization needs. So creating a network share is my only option atm.

 

[nightshade00013]

The R710 will run FreeNAS just fine so that is a one and done minus it possibly having a raid controller either included or embedded rather than a HBA. Everything will run on that box easily.