Sadly Plex does not support Sonic analysis on BSD and thus on TrueNAS Core. Since I'm running core (started off with FreeNAS 4,5 years ago) on my NAS (running an E3-1225 v5 and 32 GB of RAM), the only way to try out the Sonic features was to run a VM and setup another Plex server in Docker besides my jail that's been up and running basically since the iocage move. The issue is that it's painfully slow, PlexAMP taking seconds to respond on a remote computer and load the album contents, start playing, etc., with the CPU often being pegged at 100 % usage on the 4 threads I've given the VM (of the 4 threads available). The jail server has always been perfectly fine, snappy, I've also setup a Hyper-V Ubuntu VM on my main machine and that was perfectly fine and snappy even with two threads (I've now given it 12 off my 8700K to perform the sonic analysis hopefully a bit faster).
So, looks like the bhyve hypervisor is somewhat slow. If I want to run the sonic features on my Plex server and, ideally, not run two distinct servers (I would survive with the docker one being a bit slower, but still, if I can optimise things, why not), I'd need to either:
a) improve the performance of the VM in TrueNAS CORE
b) run TrueNAS SCALE
Option b), what happens here?
b.a)I've heard some comments that kubernetes takes up a lot of resources to run docker containers even just sitting there as well, with no containers set up. Is that still true? Not being able to run portainer is also less than ideal, but I guess I could manage that in the long run.
b.b)run an Ubuntu VM and run standard Docker? But I guess that doesn't make THAT much sense as well if the base system could (can?) run it properly...
I have SCALE on the horizon at some point anyway because I'm thinking of getting a compute box up and running in a separate case for now, but I wouldn't mind consolidating that with the NAS (with ~20 cores for example) and run the compute part in a VM -> that would require running a Type-1 hypervisor, so CORE is out of the question for now (I'd prefer to virtualize it within TrueNAS, given SCALE can do it, as backing up everything and provisioning the hardware would be much easier than running for example ESXi or Proxmox and virtualizing TrueNAS as well).
What's the best solution here? Bite the bullet and go SCALE? Or is there another solution? Maybe CORE will be moving to Linux soon-ish and make the point moot?
EDIT: option c) would be best - Plex implements Sonic features to BSD variants of the server and we're good to go. I much prefer jails having their own MAC address, which means I can give them a unique IP and with local DNS it's easy to administer the services. But I'm guessing that will be a no-go in the long run...
So, looks like the bhyve hypervisor is somewhat slow. If I want to run the sonic features on my Plex server and, ideally, not run two distinct servers (I would survive with the docker one being a bit slower, but still, if I can optimise things, why not), I'd need to either:
a) improve the performance of the VM in TrueNAS CORE
b) run TrueNAS SCALE
Option b), what happens here?
b.a)I've heard some comments that kubernetes takes up a lot of resources to run docker containers even just sitting there as well, with no containers set up. Is that still true? Not being able to run portainer is also less than ideal, but I guess I could manage that in the long run.
b.b)run an Ubuntu VM and run standard Docker? But I guess that doesn't make THAT much sense as well if the base system could (can?) run it properly...
I have SCALE on the horizon at some point anyway because I'm thinking of getting a compute box up and running in a separate case for now, but I wouldn't mind consolidating that with the NAS (with ~20 cores for example) and run the compute part in a VM -> that would require running a Type-1 hypervisor, so CORE is out of the question for now (I'd prefer to virtualize it within TrueNAS, given SCALE can do it, as backing up everything and provisioning the hardware would be much easier than running for example ESXi or Proxmox and virtualizing TrueNAS as well).
What's the best solution here? Bite the bullet and go SCALE? Or is there another solution? Maybe CORE will be moving to Linux soon-ish and make the point moot?
EDIT: option c) would be best - Plex implements Sonic features to BSD variants of the server and we're good to go. I much prefer jails having their own MAC address, which means I can give them a unique IP and with local DNS it's easy to administer the services. But I'm guessing that will be a no-go in the long run...
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