Calling on Systems Engineers | Data Center | INFOSEC People <--------

[thedarkdad3]

Looking for people with "real world enterprise experience" that understand intermediate to advanced INFOSEC Roles | Routing | networking and do it on day to day basis.

 

Hopefully it will weed out the average end user.

 

I have an HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen10 Server

 

 Intel Xeon® Scalable 4110

32GB RAM (eventually 192gb) 

x8 WD 6TB RED NAS Drives

nVidia P2000

 

I have been sitting on the server build for almost 1-year and I am no looking to migrate my data from 3 NAS devices to this one server. It sitting on a all Cisco Meraki Network with Meraki switches | AP and Meraki firewalls (all in home | home office)

 

I have ONE goal , well one ask for this. I want it to run PLEX & Utilize an nVidia P2000 for all the 4k content I have. Aside from that I dont care about "vm's" I may want some down the line. I know I'll want at least one VM running windows server 2016 as I have a license for it already. 

 

I am looking into FREEnas due to ZFS architecture & the fact it runs BSD under the hood. I just got done working on a project with Red Hat Enterprise so I really do miss unix in my life. Only reason I run windows its for gaming. Even then I think my new (PC build) separate topic is going to have unix and windows partition .  

 

I am looking for people that have scaled this out in past 12 months and that can give me some feedback on FREEnas. Not just linked me to a wiki or youtube. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[WereCatf]

25 minutes ago, thedarkdad3 said:

I am looking into FREEnas due to ZFS architecture & the fact it runs BSD under the hood

Apparently the virtual machine hypervisor FreeBSD (and therefore FreeNAS) uses isn't particularly good, so you might want to use something else for that, or at least look up on whether it really suits your needs or not. You could consider e.g. Proxmox instead.

 

30 minutes ago, thedarkdad3 said:

I want it to run PLEX & Utilize an nVidia P2000 for all the 4k content I have

Plex doesn't support NVIDIA's hardware for any encoding or decoding under FreeNAS/FreeBSD. You need Windows or Linux for that.

[Windows7ge]

FreeNAS uses Bhyve as a hypervisor and from first hand experience it's terrible. If you want ZFS and a good hypervisor look into PROXMOX.

[leadeater]

I'm not even sure why you think an experienced systems engineer would be of any help to your question, not being rude but that kind of skill set doesn't really have much to do with what you are asking. The are many members on the forum with direct experience in what you are asking.

 

First of all if all you intend to run is FreeNAS and Plex with basically a single VM at some later point then 32GB is all you are ever going to need, upgrading to 192GB isn't going to give you anything of usable value. You don't need a GPU for Plex either, just keep all your content in the most widely supported codec/formats and play at native which will result in near zero CPU usage and GPU will not be utilized at all. Transcoding is where you see CPU or GPU usage and you can completely avoid that.

 

Proxmox, ESXi + HW RAID, Windows Hyper-V Server + Storage Spaces or HW RAID, any flavor of KVM etc will all do the job perfectly fine. However it seems to me you are over complicating the matter if you don't have any intention to run 3 or more VMs, if the main purpose is Plex then just run bare metal install of Linux or Windows then in the case where you do what to run a VM both have excellent options of doing that. Installing a platform designed for VM hosting to then run a single use case on it is just adding extra overhead and administration that is unnecessary.

 

So I would either just install FreeNAS and Plex plugins and forgo running any VMs on the server or bare metal Linux or Windows and address the VM situation when it comes up.

[Jarsky]

I second @leadeater; as im also a systems engineer working in enterprise with Wintel, Hypervisor, Network, Firewall, Unix, Server/Datacenter, etc...I have absolutely no idea why you need a system engineers input, especially someone from infosec. What you need is someone with experience with the particular softwares and configuration you're wanting to setup, and many of the people in this subforum that can help you are just enthusiasts. 

 

As an enthusiast I can tell you that Bhyve (FreeNAS virtual manager) does not like hardware passthrough, and currently doesn't work with non-intel GPU's. It may very well come with FreeNAS 12, but not sure about that yet. 

 

As already pointed out, you only need a GPU if you're going to be transcoding those 4K streams such as to mobile devices, web, etc..If your client devices (tablets, shield, smart-tv's, android box, etc...) support Directplay / Directstream of 4K content then unless you're going to be wanting to stream away from home at a lower resolution/bitrate, then you wont need to transcode. 

 

If you do really want to run that GPU, then i'd recommend going with a different solution. Some solutions would be:

- A Linux distribution with ZoL (ZFS on Linux), and either run Nvidia Docker + Plex Docker or create a VM with QEMU and do hardware pass through to the VM if you really want to seperate it from the storage host. For the VM you can go with something like Proxmox VE or you could install RHEL/Debian/Ubuntu and install libvirt/qemu/virt-manager/cockpit for managing VM's. For doing everything by Docker im a big fan of Ubuntu Server + Portainer. 

- Install a baremetal hypervisor like ESXi, passthrough a HBA controller to a FreeNAS VM, use that exclusively for storage, and then do a Docker Server for Plex and any other apps you might want related to media management (Sonarr/Radarr/FileBot/torrent client/etc...)

- Get a hardware RAID controller (like an LSI 9260-8i / 9271-8i) for your storage array and run Windows and install Plex on that. That way you get native Windows ACL's (security control) without advanced acl_xattr configuration, and its easy to manage, high performance and robust. 

[thedarkdad3]

Thanks for feedback after hours of reading and talking to a few other people . I am going with  Server 2019 as base on HP Proliant server with HPE Smart Array SR Secure Encryption and Smartcache license.