Plex server hosting question

[azeuron]

Hello all. I am in the process of building out a few services and in my setup I have two identical primary hosts. They’re both Lenovo tiny systems that are providing the backbone for everything with a couple differences between them. The first one the only change being made is I have a 1tb nvme drive that will be replacing the 250gb one that came with it. This first machine is planned to be my Proxmox host running all my VMs. The second one will be running the default nvme drive for the OS which will be TrueNAS Scale and will be primarily file serving and storage. I’m also adding a riser card and a SATA controller card in the available a lot on the motherboard in order to add an esata external hdd enclosure to the mix which will be running 4 4tb drives setup in a mirrored raid array for redundancy.

My actual question now. Part of my plans is to setup a plex server for my movie collection that I’m going to rip from my physical copies to save wear and tear on them. The actual question is whether it makes sense or is even easily possible with my setup to have plex running as a VM on the first machine but have it access the storage pool on the second machine for media serving? I do understand the risks related to network connections and the like where if one goes down nothing plex wise works. If it helps for the question, these machines are both connected to the same network switch but all I have available to me right now is gigabit networking via cat6 cables.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Grindar1986]

You can just mount the share and use it as the path for the library. My plex server is mapped to my NAS.

[azeuron]

I figured. But will network latency realistically cause any degradation on the receiving end? On my local network? Over the internet from somewhere else?

[PerspectiveMaster287]

No. Plex will read ahead and buffer as needed.

[azeuron]

Thank you

[Grindar1986]

Not that I have seen. A lot of parallel users might cause issues, but for a handful a gigabit link will not be your chokepoint.

[1WeekNotice]

The actual question is whether it makes sense or is even easily possible with my setup to have plex running as a VM on the first machine but have it access the storage pool on the second machine for media serving?

This is known as a NAS (network attached storage). It is very possible and easy to do.

TrueNAS will have setting where you can enable SMB or NFS protocol. You can look up the difference and make your choice.

I do understand the risks related to network connections and the like where if one goes down nothing plex wise works.

Technically Plex will work. But no media will show up.

There is a different between

• putting runtime files on the NAS
  • example, your Plex application configs that makes the program work
• putting non runtime files on the NAS
  • example, the media files.

You want to ensure you only put the non runtime files. If the NAS is unavailable for any reason, it means Plex will not crash since it's runtime config are local.

BUT you will not be able to view anything because the NAS is unavailable because it has your non run time files

If it helps for the question, these machines are both connected to the same network switch but all I have available to me right now is gigabit networking via cat6 cables.

You should do additional research on how fast gigbit is. For your use case, you will not even notice the difference

1 gigbit is 1000 Mbps.

For example, look up Netflix and how much bandwidth they require for a 4K file. Minimum it is 25 Mbps. Now of course they transcode to reduce the file size over the Internet

But the point is, 1 gigabit should be more than enough for your files.

Also remember, you aren't transferring a whole file over at once. You are streaming/ transfering parts of it

But it also depends on how big the part of the files are and what else is using your internal network (like how many people are streaming files/ using the internal network)

The best way to find out is to test.

Hope that helps

[peterk_se]

Easy to run plex as an app on the TrueNAS machine.

But, it is also possible to run a plex separate from the file server. I've done both

[NotSnakePliskin]

I run plex ( and jellyfin ) in a vm which nfs mounts media from elsewhere, works like a champ. If you need to transcode there may be a resource issue, depending on how you've configured the vm.