Best setup advice

[stevevmw]

i have a n40l microserver

3 2tb drives
8gb memory

I basically want to store my media (photo's, movies and music) on the machine so it can be accessed from other machines and iPads, iPhones etc.

Setup I have installed as follows

Esxi
Installed Freenas as a VM
Installed Plex plugin

I have enabled cfis and nfs shares.

What would the best way to upload my media? Connecting to windows share and just dragging and dropping ? My concern here is that in case I have a issue with my VM I may loose the data. Is it possible to basically use one of the 2tb drives to copy my date and then share to free nas?

 

[danb35]

The best setup advice is https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...nas-in-production-as-a-virtual-machine.12484/

 

[Ericloewe]

You're concerned about the inconsequential problems (data lost during transfer? Use copy instead of cut and checksum it.).

The VM is the real problem, * especially* on such underpowered hardware.
You shouldn't even run Plex with less than 12GB of RAM (I wouldn't with less than 16GB)!

 

[jgreco]

The VM is the real problem, * especially* on such underpowered hardware.

Eh, the N40L is simply not suitable to the task when running ESXi on it. There's no VT-d, there's no good way to manage the disks, there's probably not enough memory even if you max it out at 16GB.

 

[NickB]

I had a similar setup for a little while, and it worked out ok for the time being. I ran FreeNAS as vm, and used it to support vms over nfs (not the most ideal option by any means, but I wanted it for the raid capabilities and was also limited on hardware).

But I chose to run plex on a linux vm rather than in a jail on FreeNAS. I did have to give plex 6GB of memory so it would run smooth and my FreeNAS vm had 8. So what you have is a bit limiting.


If it were me, I'd go with FreeNAS on bare metal rather than esx. Setup raid 1 with two of the disks and setup a dataset for your media files on that. Then setup cifs if you're using Windows to copy data to it, then a jail for FreeNAS, then install Plex through the FreeBSD ports. You'll then need to mount the media files to the plex jail.

There really isn't any point in keeping esx as you won't have any memory left to give other vms after giving FreeNAS what it needs. And if you want to have have virtual machines, you can install the phpVirtualBox jail and throw vms on that. But, you really don't have that much memory to do that either.