Plex in a VM

[raidflex]

Anyone have some experience with running Plex as a VM using bhyve and a Linux distro for the host. I currently run the Plexpass version in a custom jail which runs great. The issue is after wanting to migrate my large music collection to Plex I found that there is no support for Gracenote in Freebsd, which is required to use the Plex Premium music features. Since I have a lot of music I really was interested in the "Plex Mix" feature which is basically like Pandora so I would not need to manually add music to a playlist, the server would automate this.

What I am concerned with is I have a lot of video media and wondering about the performance hit in using a VM vs the jail and transcoding. Also concerned with reserving memory for the VM, will bhyve release memory that is not used or once I allocate a certain amount of memory then the host Freenas system cannot utilize this anymore. I like the jail setup because its very light and stable.

So if there is anyone that has made the switch I would love to hear some feedback and experiences.

 

[chris crude]

I do not use it in a Linux VM, but a Win10 VM. I know it seems like a waste of resources, but i had to edit many files on my original server and wanted to be sure no metadata or custom names was lost in translation. No issues.

 

[raidflex]

I do not use it in a Linux VM, but a Win10 VM. I know it seems like a waste of resources, but i had to edit many files on my original server and wanted to be sure no metadata or custom names was lost in translation. No issues.

Couple questions:

Have you done any large file transcoding, I have a good number for 25+GB MKV files and I want to make sure there would not be any issues.

Also I noticed you mentioned editing files, how was the process of moving databases between platforms? I would like to carrier over all the settings and especially the video thumbnails which take forever to re-encode.

Also how about file access, with the jails it has direct access to the shares I specify instead of using NFS/SMB. Is it possible to mount a dataset as a local drive for that VM?

 

[chris crude]

i dont have any files that big,but nearly every Plex client can play mkv natively without using the server to transcode so i don't think it would be an issue.

Moving the database was easy since i went from a windows server to a windows VM. Main reason i did it that way because i didn't want anything to get lost in translation, didnt have the time or patience to test so i just went the easy route.

I have a CIFS/SMB share on my FreeNAS that stores all my files. I simply pointed Plex towards those files. You might be able to make a symbolic link, but i havent needed to go that far. Performance is good so i didnt mess with it any further. Have used it like this since FreeNAS 11 came out making VMs an option.

 

[raidflex]

i dont have any files that big,but nearly every Plex client can play mkv natively without using the server to transcode so i don't think it would be an issue.

Moving the database was easy since i went from a windows server to a windows VM. Main reason i did it that way because i didn't want anything to get lost in translation, didnt have the time or patience to test so i just went the easy route.

I have a CIFS/SMB share on my FreeNAS that stores all my files. I simply pointed Plex towards those files. You might be able to make a symbolic link, but i havent needed to go that far. Performance is good so i didnt mess with it any further. Have used it like this since FreeNAS 11 came out making VMs an option.

Thanks for the input.

I use Plex for mobile viewing and have a couple people that stream so the server would be transcoding most of the time, that is why I was concerned about performance. At home I have a Emby/Kodi setup for local viewing.

So the big question then is if it is possible to transfer the settings/video thumbnails from the Freebsd database to a Linux based one.

Using CIFS/NFS was what I am concerned with causing performance issues when it needs to parse a large database. I have a very large database of content, over 18TB. So I am not sure how big your database is as a comparison.

 

[chris crude]

Thanks for the input.

I use Plex for mobile viewing and have a couple people that stream so the server would be transcoding most of the time, that is why I was concerned about performance. At home I have a Emby/Kodi setup for local viewing.

So the big question then is if it is possible to transfer the settings/video thumbnails from the Freebsd database to a Linux based one.

Using CIFS/NFS was what I am concerned with causing performance issues when it needs to parse a large database. I have a very large database of content, over 18TB. So I am not sure how big your database is as a comparison.

I forgot to mention that I setup separate pool of 2x250GB mirror SSD cards to host my VMs and kept them off the main data pool. Doing full library scans doesn't take a long time for me, your mileage may vary.