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.
I’m certainly a proponent of having at least 2 nodes, even if one is offline most of the time and only brought up for replication and upgrades so I’d be inclined to go with A. But one thing to consider is that PM wants a quorum on node votes for when you’re doing cluster operations like joining and leaving nodes, changing storage, etc. For this purpose I have the PBS server act as the 3rd vote with a qdevice installed on it and joined to the cluster. You can also accomplish this by setting expected_votes=1 in a 2 node cluster, but I’ve found that a little unreliable and the qdevice method always works. You can also put the qdevice on a VM that you keep up and migrate between nodes when you’re upgrading to keep quorum, though I’ve never tried that. But the qdevice service can go on any linux system that you’re likely to have up all the time, raspberrypi, your desktop, etc.
You can add and remove nodes as you wish, I’ve done that in hardware upgrades where I’ve moved guests off to another node, removed that node from the cluster (preferably from the node you’re upgrading itself and make damn sure it’s replicated to the remaining node before you down the node), completely rebuilt the node and reinstalled it, then joined it back to the cluster and migrated guests back. Again, you will need a quorum active on the cluster throughout this process.
I like the idea of keeping the Plex storage off the PM server, though it’s not entirely necessary. If it’s a Linux device, you can also install a client that will backup the system and anything else you need to PBS, it will do non-PM device backups as well. I have my desktops, laptops and HTPC backup that way and have used it to recover and even reinstantiated a laptop backup as a VM when I needed to check something after I had the physical laptop crater as it was easier to restore it as a VM so I could use the DE to find what I needed than to sort it out of the filesystem. I’ve only every used it with ext4 installed systems, so use with caution on more exotic setups.
You might also have your plex storage connected to the plex VM via iSCSI, nbd or sshfs? Just a thought there. Personally, I wouldn’t trust samba sharing to wash my toilet, but plenty use that as well. NFS can be unreliable as well as it’s recovery from network outages isn’t perfect.
Proxmox also is integrated with CephFS, which might be of interest if you’re also thinking about gluster. I’ve never used it or really investigated how PM uses it, but it might fill your needs there.