New NAS for Plex - Architecture Questions.

[Nopsled]

Hey All,

New here. Been lurking for a while. I have a pretty decently home "lab" setup with a 42U rack and a few ESXi servers on some R710s. I have a few existing NAS (Synology) used for backup and hosting VMs but am ready to go all in on a Plex server. Couple questions ...

To set the stage, I have a used Supermicro 4U barebones case with a SAS2 backplane that I ordered on eBay. The main question I have is, should I run the Supermicro 4U as a minimal spec'd server just for NAS only purposes and run the Plex server (and all the other apps that go with it) off of my ESXi hosts or should I build up the Supermicro 4U to run everything there? This will be only for hosting media that will be utilized by Plex, at least at the moment.

This would be on FreeNAS OS (probably obviously given where I'm posting this) :)

TL;DR - Use ESXi hosts to run the Plex server (and all other apps) and run a minimal spec'd NAS or build a beefy NAS and run everything off of that.

Lastly - What motherboard/cpu(s)/raid/SAS controller/etc should I look at with your recommended approach.

Cheers and thanks for the help!

 

[Nopsled]

Bump for the AM crowd.

 

[SweetAndLow]

Plex on freebsd works great! But... Has some missing features such as gracenote support and ipv6 is broken. This could be enough to give the 2 server solution the edge because that stuff works on Linux I think. I run Plex in a jail on freenas and love that solution because the media files are local to the jail and management is simple. Also my freenas server is idle most of the time so running Plex is no big deal. Both ways are great though.

 

[depasseg]

To set the stage, I have a used Supermicro 4U barebones case with a SAS2 backplane that I ordered on eBay. The main question I have is, should I run the Supermicro 4U as a minimal spec'd server just for NAS only purposes and run the Plex server (and all the other apps that go with it) off of my ESXi hosts or should I build up the Supermicro 4U to run everything there? This will be only for hosting media that will be utilized by Plex, at least at the moment.

It really depends on your environment. If your ESX lab servers are stable and rarely go down, then that's probably a more flexible choice. Personally, I'm running mine on my freenas so I don't have to worry about it.

 

[mjt5282]

I also run Plex (paid Plexpass Freebsd version) in a jail on my 32Gb Xeon NAS. that and a jail just for MRTG and running flac utils (called util). I am very happy with it. Fast, reliable. I am also running iohyve Debian for my RoonServer (music). Maybe next time I will buy a motherboard with 64Gb of RAM support.... In my LAN configuration, I had to disable ipv6 FYI otherwise the /etc/resolv.conf would not resolve any IPv4 addresses. Will make it appear to break Plex.