Hello!
I’ve had Linux server/s at home for hobby and fun for years. My current “main” server is quite old, quite slow, and in need of an upgrade.
I acquired a used Thinkstation Mini SFF, which blows the old one out of the water, being like 15% of the size. The heaviest usage is a Plex server for my and my family. Current setup has worked well but it’s unable to transcode properly, without a lot of noise and only some codecs/resolutions.
I installed Proxmox on this Thinkstation device and it works very well. I migrated my WP family blog from a Virtualbox to Proxmox VM, worked perfectly.
I then used the helper scripts to install Plex for testing. I got hardware acceleration working with the i5-8500T/UHD 630. Did some testing and it seems to work great.
I have yet to migrate the server and the data. The Thinkstation has ~320gb SSD disk which is way to small for my video collection.
So I’m what I’m wondering, what is the best next step? I can one or more similar devices for cheap/nothing.
I don’t really understand the nodes function of Proxmox properly.
Should I:
A) Use my current one as a “main” node, install large SSD/HDD on 1 or 2 similar devices and connect them as storage nodes?
B) Add large USB SSD/HDD to my existing Proxmox device?
C) Setup a simple NAS device and connect Proxmox to that?
D) Something else?
After that’s decided, I could then move the Plex installation/setup from my current server to the Proxmox setup.
The usage is not heavy, 3 concurrent streams are rare. Media is currently mostly 1080p.
My main concern is the Plex setup, but if one setup is more futureproof, smarter, handier, cooler, nicer than the other, I’d greatly appreciate your input.
Strongly recommend setting up a NAS device to store your media - it’ll stop you from having to migrate data and reconfigure Plex when your storage fills up. You can upgrade the storage whenever you need and mount it via NFS/SMB in Proxmox under Datacenter > Storage
You can even run the NAS in Proxmox if you feel froggy. Just make sure to connect all the drives directly to your VM instead of the Proxmox Host, and make sure it’s started BEFORE you try to run any other VMs because those shares won’t be available without that VM being on.
You might want the NAS on other hardware to avoid that, but that’s your decision.
Thanks for the reply. Yes, sounds good.
Why not upgrade the disk in the new proxmox device?
Hi, thanks for the reply. Yeah, that is of course an possibility also, just backup the containers and vms and start over. But I’m still keen on the idea of adding another device, possibly for mirroring or other types of backup.
Your device only has 4 cores so I would go with a separate storage device.
I’d suggest using ZFS for the OS and the VM storage. If you have multiple nodes, you can set up replication easily for easy migration or recovery if your main node goes down. If you set up plex on a NAS, you would have to set up the NAS shares on the other node(s) in case you end up bringing the VM up on another node.
What I’ve done is have a very large ZFS striped-mirror that contains all my VMs and their attached drives, as you can specify and overprovision virtual drives on the same zpool. Then these VMs replicate to the other nodes every hour. I can also live migrate the VMs very quickly since they’re replicated constantly so if I need to upgrade a node, I batch migrate everyone over to the other nodes, do my upgrades and migrate everyone back and upgrade the other nodes, then rebalance them where I like them. I get that you’re on an SFF, so if you can get 2 drives in it and mirror them, you’re probably fine.
And then all that is backed up via Proxmox Backup Server on a shitty old i3 with a local attached SATA and other USB drives I periodically change out and take offsite for replication to another offline proxmox server.
You can also pass through a GPU for hardware encoding to your Plex/jellyfin VM.
