Running Plex in a zone under OmniOS (Performance Penalty?)

[kroem]

I have been tinkering with the idea of moving from Napp-it inside ESXi to bare metal - but since I want to utilize the E5 I have in this box for Plex transcoding I wondering if anyone tried running Debian/Plex inside OmniOS?

I really have not tried zones/containers at all, so have no experience.

 

[cperalt1]

The best performance would be to use a recent OmniOS build and deploy Plex inside an LX-Container. Last I checked the only thing that didn't work this way is the Plex DLNA server. I have run this under Smart OS inside the LX container and indeed it does work. I'd recommend passing your media mounts via LOFS to the appropriate container.

 

[cperalt1]

I just checked with the OmniOS folks, looks like the lx branded zones have not been up streamed by Joyent from SmartOS to Illumos yet so no lx-branded zone in OmniOS yet. Works great on SmartOS though.

 

[kroem]

I'll have to read up in the difference first to know if I should be sad or not

 

[cperalt1]

lx branded zone = bare metal performance. Debian VM = VM performance penalty via KVM. For your use case running a linux VM under OmniOS for Plex should be okay.

 

[weeman]

Your other option is running Plex in an LXC container under Proxmox.

This will give you bare metal performance as well as native ZFS which you can passthrough to the Plex container.

I'm running this setup at home and it works well and you get a nice GUI to manage the VMs.

 

[kroem]

lx branded zone = bare metal performance. Debian VM = VM performance penalty via KVM. For your use case running a linux VM under OmniOS for Plex should be okay.

Ah got it!

Your other option is running Plex in an LXC container under Proxmox.

This will give you bare metal performance as well as native ZFS which you can passthrough to the Plex container.

I'm running this setup at home and it works well and you get a nice GUI to manage the VMs.

Hmm, that could be another option, but then I'd lose napp-it. Can Proxmos do sharing via NFS?

 

[weeman]

Proxmox is based on debian so yes you can create NFS / Samba shares on the host or passthrough the file system to an LXC container and create the shares in the container.