server side smb copy napp-it

[dragonme]

I was messing with esxi and trying to decide how I am going to replace a VERY old OS X server based server that is using openzfs on OS X with new hardware and probably esxi as the bare metal

messing with freenas I noted that copying a folder of material via SMB showed no network activity when doing a folder duplicate operation on a OS X VM connected to freenas VIA smb

tried the same thing in napp-it and noticed network at full bandwidth.. ie the data was round tripping from napp-it to osx client back to napp-it

has server side copy not been implemented in omnios?

I am using the latest napp-it all in one and have the VMs running off a NFS esxi dataset provided by napp-it and then connecting the OSX client to napp-it smb shares to avoid NFS sync write behaviour inside the VM disk

one problem I am also messing with is that if I go the ESXI napp-it route, that I will have issues with osx server as it needs an HFS+ formatted data drive for many of its services and the only way I can see doing it is running the VM from the NFS esxi data share, then having an iscsi target on napp-it and trying to find a free osx initiator to give the OSX server VM a true block level device

any help appreciated...

 

[ttabbal]

Do you need OSX server for some other reason? If you can drop it, things are simpler. There are iSCSI initiators for OSX, but I only found one free one and it was kind of crashy. I think FreeNAS and napp-it have implemented enough to get things like Time Machine to work.

Another option is to provide some storage to ESXI and have it pass it to the OSX VM as a block device. You might even be able to iSCSI a ZVOL to ESXI and pass that into the VM.

If this is for business, last time I looked Apple's license only allowed OSX to run virtualized on a Mac. Your company may or may not care about that. I personally think such clauses are ridiculous and deserve to be ignored, but it also doesn't affect me.

Not sure about SMB server side copy. I don't use SMB much around here.

 

[dragonme]

you always seem to come to my rescue!! hehe

osx server... I liked (scratch that.. the wife and kid find it easier) when osx server is serving up shares for certain things.. also the SMB versions match and perform better.

osx server has a couple things I have used and I am evaluating other

VPN Server .. I am experimenting with openvpn that is built into my asus router but the OSX one felt faster

Caching server for apple OS X / ios downloads

time machine integration though osx server is superior

file sharing.. ability to use ACLs and control who sees what much better (napp-it charges) and freensas does not seem as fast

openzfs on osx broke ACLs that I had on my old 10.6 server with apples experimental zfs.. changes in apples file system and openzfs can no longer handle ACLs though the gui and zfs shares dont show up at all in server app natively hence my move to something different


OLD server is running OS X server on metal, with 12TB of primary storage though openZFSonOSX providing
A security DVR (security spy)
PLEX (a MUST HAVE) primary reason it lives
own cloud

not a company ... just home stuff...

IDEALLY new server

ESXI on metal perhaps with photon docker containers...

Napp-it VM serving the storage ( I have ESXI booting from stick on internal header and napp-it one booting from a 2.5 80gb USB hard drive on interal header) passing all SATA and a lsi 9212-4e-4i for the disks in the server and to attach a 24 disk backup jbod via sff cable

OSX VM (serving the above unless);

own cloud (container)

plex (container)

zoneminder (container)

if I can figure out ESXI new VIC / photon thing

I just wish napp-it had a nicer and more graphical front end and was totatly free at home...

I have considered Proxmox and native zfs there or Freenas... but OSX as a VM on either of those are not easy.


I would love to just run OSX on the metal on this new hardware (dual 5640s) but my lsi 9212 has no OSX driver and I dont feel like buying a multi hundred atto to do the same thing as this $50 card

 

[gea]

Samba 4.1 is able to do server side copy, Solarish CIFS not.
You can use SAMBA on Solarish as it has more features but Solarish CIFS has its own advantages especially performance, easyness and a better compatibility with ntfs/AD ACL or Snaps as previous version.

 

[ttabbal]

For VPN, consumer routers kind of universally suck. I recently set up a pfSense firewall and found it really easy to set up a VPN server there. It might be an option to consider. You could even virtualize it if you have a couple NIC ports you can pass through to the VM. It could also be done with the ESXI networking stuff and proxmox's open vSwitch. Just a little harder to set up.

For access control, I'm not sure why ACLs are required? SMB's built in user controls seem to work pretty well. When I do use it, I usually just set some users to have access to different shares. If you have everything in one share or otherwise want to control access on a single share it gets a little trickier. I use NFS for most internal stuff, just make sure UIDs match on the server and clients, and you're good to go with that. And if you're using OSX clients, NFS + autofs works really well. I know AFP is supported pretty universally now as well, but I haven't used it much. All that said, the Solaris ACLs are still available in napp-it, just not the GUI. You should be able to set them up on the command line. As an OSX user, I know that can be annoying, but if you limit your CLI use to just a few things like ACLs, it's usually not too bad.

For backup, if you're willing to change things up a little, I find Crashplan easier to deal with than Time Machine. For a built-in backup app, Time Machine is pretty good though. I also see used Time Capsules available reasonably priced, it might be something to consider. Though that comes with it's own downsides.

Just throwing some ideas out there. I'm using proxmox/ZFS/containers and have been happy with them. Though the only pre-built container I have I think was MySql. The rest I just started with a Debian container and built on from there. But you're right, OSX is far easier to run on ESXI. I even tinkered with using Proxmox to host an OSX install for my workstation, but never did get it working the way I wanted. As much as I like some things about OSX, Apple has been doing their best to piss me off lately. My 2011 MBP might be my last Apple box.

Plex and OwnCloud are really easy to set up on most anything, so they are fine. Even if ESXI gives you trouble with Docker, you can run a Docker host as a VM and put containers in there. I think your basic plan is workable, but you might need to change a couple things around, even with OSX in a VM.

I see gea replied as well, he's the man with napp-it.

 

[dragonme]

For VPN, consumer routers kind of universally suck. I recently set up a pfSense firewall and found it really easy to set up a VPN server there. It might be an option to consider. You could even virtualize it if you have a couple NIC ports you can pass through to the VM. It could also be done with the ESXI networking stuff and proxmox's open vSwitch. Just a little harder to set up.

For access control, I'm not sure why ACLs are required? SMB's built in user controls seem to work pretty well. When I do use it, I usually just set some users to have access to different shares. If you have everything in one share or otherwise want to control access on a single share it gets a little trickier. I use NFS for most internal stuff, just make sure UIDs match on the server and clients, and you're good to go with that. And if you're using OSX clients, NFS + autofs works really well. I know AFP is supported pretty universally now as well, but I haven't used it much. All that said, the Solaris ACLs are still available in napp-it, just not the GUI. You should be able to set them up on the command line. As an OSX user, I know that can be annoying, but if you limit your CLI use to just a few things like ACLs, it's usually not too bad.

For backup, if you're willing to change things up a little, I find Crashplan easier to deal with than Time Machine. For a built-in backup app, Time Machine is pretty good though. I also see used Time Capsules available reasonably priced, it might be something to consider. Though that comes with it's own downsides.

Just throwing some ideas out there. I'm using proxmox/ZFS/containers and have been happy with them. Though the only pre-built container I have I think was MySql. The rest I just started with a Debian container and built on from there. But you're right, OSX is far easier to run on ESXI. I even tinkered with using Proxmox to host an OSX install for my workstation, but never did get it working the way I wanted. As much as I like some things about OSX, Apple has been doing their best to piss me off lately. My 2011 MBP might be my last Apple box.

Plex and OwnCloud are really easy to set up on most anything, so they are fine. Even if ESXI gives you trouble with Docker, you can run a Docker host as a VM and put containers in there. I think your basic plan is workable, but you might need to change a couple things around, even with OSX in a VM.

I see gea replied as well, he's the man with napp-it.

thanks... yeah.. I am torn on how I want to go.. but suffice to say that 7 years ago I had a rocking 10.6 server that did everything I wanted and did it well... and here it is 7 years later.. an e8400 mind you.. and it still serving my plex but the server services are on the downswing due to permissions and ACL issues mostly and a lack of integration with openzfs and the osx file system.

so after spending some coin on a dual processor 12 core 24 thread machine with 48g of ram I dont want to have to run a whole bunch more hardware to do what I was doing with something with 1/20th of the specs.

I find ESXI and its web interface a total clusterfuck.. I cant believe people pay thousands to run this software.. its awful...

as far as osx long term.. biggest problem I see on the horizon is that its been many years since apple has made a machine with pci-e slots and sever grade hardware so drivers and compatibilty with hardware is starting to really suffer.

couple that with a new operating system and a new apple file system that is comming out in the fall and I fear that OSX is going to be a power user version of IOS for another couple years and then fully integrated into IOS.. the macbooks of the future will be arm machines ie ipads with keyboards and there will be no desktop or pro gear left.

that I why I have been building my own hardware since 2006.. apple no longer offers me the hardware I want or need.

going fully open source would be nice but lets face it.. I dont think there is a desktop software package out there that matches OSX yet...

 

[dragonme]

Samba 4.1 is able to do server side copy, Solarish CIFS not.
You can use SAMBA on Solarish as it has more features but Solarish CIFS has its own advantages especially performance, easyness and a better compatibility with ntfs/AD ACL or Snaps as previous version.

thanks gea...

so what is you best practices here... I have read your guide and it mostly caters to windows users...

I am a mac household and have not run a microshit program in over a decade.

that said.. I think that my NFS store to ESXI seems to work pretty well... very slow without SSDs right now but it is faster than freenas I think as far as NFS.. freenas was faster with its smb however and server side copy operations really smoke as they are not crippled by network speeds.

so how can I optimize napp-it provided services to cateer specifically to OSX. I want to use SMB as I think that AFP is on the way out so I want to keep connections SMB for clients.

I think I am going to have to find a way to use a iscsi zvol for the osx server VM for certain services.. have you used the free iscsi initiator for OSX over on github...? or familiar with another free initiator source?

osx has previous versions now like windows previous versions ... but I doubt that will work for osx over network shares.

really 2 issues here

how to use napp-it provided zfs resources for osx server VM

and how to use zfs provided storage for network users... only talking 3 users though so I guess setting things up manually wont be too bad but would I have to ensure a users name and id match? having not run open directory for awhile and having multiple machines in the house .. a user might have a different id number on each machine but perhaps the same name.

also.. I want to do a fresh install.. how can I keep all my network settings, iscsi settings, nfs settings etc?

I have not installed a trial license I got from you yet I have heard that changeing the host name can burn it and then I would be out the license...

 

[dragonme]

got 2 intel s3500 240gb SSDs today for $60 each..

I am going to strip 4GB partitions for zil on a data pool of spinners, and then probably just mirror the remaining space for VMs

sound like a plan? The server is not very write centric ... mostly media writes once and I will have a dataset for security cameras that will have sync disabled since its not critical.

 

[ttabbal]

Yeah, I know where you are coming from there. OSX is really nice as a desktop environment. My main workstation has Ubuntu installed right now, it's pretty good, much improved from a few years back even, but still not quite as nice. I may attempt an ESXI/OSX setup with a passthrough video card with that machine.

Nice deal on the SSDs. 4GB/ea for SLOG is probably enough for what you're talking about. The VM traffic could impact the usefulness of the SLOG, but with the use levels you're talking about, it's likely fine.

 

[dragonme]

I am mostly going to use the ssd for booting the machines but I think the storage will be elsewhere so the ssd dont get hit real hard

I am happy with the desktop on the osx VM just running headless through screen sharing so probably wont add a graphics card.. definitly would not try to use a esxi vm as a desktop replacement .. again esxi really SUCKS... vmware fusion environment much nicer... their own tools and web management gui corrupt the vm settings and half the shit doesnt work.. I have to use a combination of edditing my vms whith fusion pro, the old windows #c utility and the web browser because its so jacked up...

If I were paying 10s of thousands a year licensing that shit I would want my money back...

 

[nle]

FYI Apple is transferring over to SMB, so AFP is probably not the way to go.

 

[gea]

The simplest option is the fastest, and stablest: use SMB2 on Solaris/OmniOS/OpenIndiana.
http://napp-it.org/doc/downloads/performance_smb2.pdf

If you use Solaris or OpenIndiana Desktop edition, you have a GUI for lokal file transfers.
With a CLI server edition you can use Midnight Commander for faster local transfers.

Optionally use an AiO setup with ESXi where you can virtualize different OS.
Only Problem for ESXi free: The new ESXi 6.02u2 html 5 frontend is quite new and for the
Vsphere Client that is the current default management tool you need Windows

ESXi is much faster and more stable than any virtualizer on Top of an OS like fusion.

Problem for a Mac user:
- TimeMaschine is not supported on SMB without some tweaks and some OSX features like Spotlight are not working.

The other Options:
Virtualising OSX on ESXi and use as a fileserver: slow and complicated
Use OSX on a real Mac with iSCSI to ZFS: slow and complicated
Use OSX with native ZFSonOSX: not feature comparable and not as easy (CLI managed)

Others
NFS and OSX: I have had a lot of stability problems and you lack authentication
AFP: End of life and quite an old/bad filesystem
TimeMachine especially when paired with AFP is not very stable and secure compared with ZFS and ZFS snaps.

 

[dragonme]

QUOTE="gea, post: 100667, member: 15"]The simplest option is the fastest, and stablest: use SMB2 on Solaris/OmniOS/OpenIndiana.
http://napp-it.org/doc/downloads/performance_smb2.pdf

If you use Solaris or OpenIndiana Desktop edition, you have a GUI for lokal file transfers.
With a CLI server edition you can use Midnight Commander for faster local transfers.

Optionally use an AiO setup with ESXi where you can virtualize different OS.
Only Problem for ESXi free: The new ESXi 6.02u2 html 5 frontend is quite new and for the
Vsphere Client that is the current default management tool you need Windows



ESXi is much faster and more stable than any virtualizer on Top of an OS like fusion.

Problem for a Mac user:
- TimeMaschine is not supported on SMB without some tweaks and some OSX features like Spotlight are not working.

The other Options:
Virtualising OSX on ESXi and use as a fileserver: slow and complicated
Use OSX on a real Mac with iSCSI to ZFS: slow and complicated
Use OSX with native ZFSonOSX: not feature comparable and not as easy (CLI managed)

Others
NFS and OSX: I have had a lot of stability problems and you lack authentication
AFP: End of life and quite an old/bad filesystem
TimeMachine especially when paired with AFP is not very stable and secure compared with ZFS and ZFS snaps.[/QUOTE]


thanks Gea.. but getting hella frustrated here after weeks of reading what I had working fine 8 years ago with osx just cant be replicted 8 years later with newer equipment.... nothing works together or well..

using ESXI and napp-it for storage.. it looks like I will have to abandon OS X server completely as there is no way to get it working.. unbelievable...

no point in installing and running osx server if I cant

1 integrate the environment with it
2 get any backend storage from napp-it that actually works...
A osx server most services wont work with SMB as backend storage
B iscsi from esxi napp-it one does not restart and connect properly on boot, I have to add the iscsi back to esxi manually .. I have not tried setting up iscsi share in napp-it direct to osx VM yet as I am still looking for a free initiator for OS X

without the need for OSX server on the All-in-one I am better off just running freenas on metal... that would provide

SMB shares to network OSX clients
native containers/jails for plex server, owncloud, and other services that I am currently hosting with my osx server installation

big looser here... I loose osx server time machine targets backed with zfs, osx/ios download caching, etc


I have been running osx server on metal with zfs command line since 10.6 and it worked great back then.. zfs was integrated with apples file system.. fast forward 8 years and everyting is a clusterfuck.. nothing works together .. there are more flavors of smb, cifs, nfs than at an ice cream parlor and non work together ... zfs is getting forked to death and nothing works together and feature flags is further pulling apart hardware agnostic movement of pools from system to system... ah progress...

 

[ttabbal]

In defence, ZFS forking seems to have stabilized a bit. I think most are using OpenZFS's codebase, other than Oracle, which is doing the typical Oracle thing and screwing everything up. I have been able to move my pool from OpenSolaris, to FreeNAS, to Linux, back and forth a couple times as well. No trouble. Even to new server hardware, before I finally rebuilt it from scratch to change topology.

Your biggest issues are really from Apple. They keep doing their own, incompatible, things and breaking compatibility. In the process they refuse to do any real server related stuff, so if you want a real filesystem, you're basically stuck. While the new filesystem looks interesting, it's brand new, and has little real world testing. ZFS has been in production servers with huge volumes of data for a decade or more. There's no comparison. While I applaud the desire to finally kill HFS, the real solution was to use ZFS with some GUI tools to hide the more complex bits from their users. And keeping the CLI tools, of course. At the least, you get checksums and snapshots easily and a proven codebase. Instead we get yet another filesystem that nothing else can read. NIH at it's finest. There is no good reason they cause painful compatibility problems with NFS and SMB server software. Both have multiple Open Source implementations, they could easily be 100% compatible if they wanted to.

There just aren't a lot of options, and all of them kinda suck. You can run OSX on metal, probably limited to an older version with the ZFS tools you are used to. This is nice short term, but in the Apple world, applications have zero desire to support old OSX versions. So anything that works is mostly by luck and will likely break in the long term. And there are security implications to be concerned about. I've also read about issues with mismatched OSX versions sharing files and such.

You can run an all-in-one ESXI/Solaris, though you might not gain much and you have had problems with ESXI.

You can run FreeNAS on metal with containers and such. This isn't a bad option, but looking forward, they seem to want to get rid of jails in favor of BeHyve virtualization. Not a bad idea overall, but since you seem to have similar hardware to me, it doesn't work. I THINK you can boot BSD in it, but Linux, Windows, DOS, are all out. This is, again, due to lack of backward compatibility. It could be done, but there's an easier way to do it using a newer CPU instruction and they don't want to do the old way. I don't need more powerful hardware, so I'm not interested in upgrading, and in fact just did, so I can't use FreeNAS unless I just want a NAS. I want more flexibility than that. I could virtualize FreeNAS under ESXI or Proxmox, but don't see any point in doing so.

You can run a Linux based setup. This is a bigger learning curve, but there are some tools that help. I mentioned that I'm using Proxmox. It has lightweight containers, like Docker, but not exactly. You can also use KVM full virtualization. It also has native OpenZFS support. What I do, is have Proxmox host the storage array and a mirror for boot/VM storage. It gives out ZVOLs for the containers and VMs for other services. I do run NFS/Samba on Proxmox for the LAN, then use bind mounts for the containers. I haven't done more than test KVMs as I don't need them right now. I use the network shares on Windows, OSX, and Linux clients without issues. Windows uses SMB, the others use NFS. Ocasionally I use SMB with OSX as well. It's all working fine. I actually started on FreeNAS, but had problems with Crashplan. It just doesn't work well on FreeNAS, but works flawlessly on my Linux setup. I just run it in a container and it manages backups for all the clients. There are some web based tools to help admin a setup like this, WebMin comes to mind.

If you're willing to use something like Crashplan, rather than Time Machine, my setup style can work for you. Frankly, Apple doesn't seem all that interested in Time Machine. I think they plan to replace it with snapshot support in the new filesystem. If it were ZFS, you could ZFS Send those to the server, that would be ideal. sigh. And the download caching for OSX/IOS. Is that a big thing for you? One option is a transparent proxy like Squid. That would cache everything.

Sorry for the wall of text, just trying to help you out with some ideas..

 

[dragonme]

In defence, ZFS forking seems to have stabilized a bit. I think most are using OpenZFS's codebase, other than Oracle, which is doing the typical Oracle thing and screwing everything up. I have been able to move my pool from OpenSolaris, to FreeNAS, to Linux, back and forth a couple times as well. No trouble. Even to new server hardware, before I finally rebuilt it from scratch to change topology.

Your biggest issues are really from Apple. They keep doing their own, incompatible, things and breaking compatibility. In the process they refuse to do any real server related stuff, so if you want a real filesystem, you're basically stuck. While the new filesystem looks interesting, it's brand new, and has little real world testing. ZFS has been in production servers with huge volumes of data for a decade or more. There's no comparison. While I applaud the desire to finally kill HFS, the real solution was to use ZFS with some GUI tools to hide the more complex bits from their users. And keeping the CLI tools, of course. At the least, you get checksums and snapshots easily and a proven codebase. Instead we get yet another filesystem that nothing else can read. NIH at it's finest. There is no good reason they cause painful compatibility problems with NFS and SMB server software. Both have multiple Open Source implementations, they could easily be 100% compatible if they wanted to.

There just aren't a lot of options, and all of them kinda suck. You can run OSX on metal, probably limited to an older version with the ZFS tools you are used to. This is nice short term, but in the Apple world, applications have zero desire to support old OSX versions. So anything that works is mostly by luck and will likely break in the long term. And there are security implications to be concerned about. I've also read about issues with mismatched OSX versions sharing files and such.

You can run an all-in-one ESXI/Solaris, though you might not gain much and you have had problems with ESXI.

You can run FreeNAS on metal with containers and such. This isn't a bad option, but looking forward, they seem to want to get rid of jails in favor of BeHyve virtualization. Not a bad idea overall, but since you seem to have similar hardware to me, it doesn't work. I THINK you can boot BSD in it, but Linux, Windows, DOS, are all out. This is, again, due to lack of backward compatibility. It could be done, but there's an easier way to do it using a newer CPU instruction and they don't want to do the old way. I don't need more powerful hardware, so I'm not interested in upgrading, and in fact just did, so I can't use FreeNAS unless I just want a NAS. I want more flexibility than that. I could virtualize FreeNAS under ESXI or Proxmox, but don't see any point in doing so.

You can run a Linux based setup. This is a bigger learning curve, but there are some tools that help. I mentioned that I'm using Proxmox. It has lightweight containers, like Docker, but not exactly. You can also use KVM full virtualization. It also has native OpenZFS support. What I do, is have Proxmox host the storage array and a mirror for boot/VM storage. It gives out ZVOLs for the containers and VMs for other services. I do run NFS/Samba on Proxmox for the LAN, then use bind mounts for the containers. I haven't done more than test KVMs as I don't need them right now. I use the network shares on Windows, OSX, and Linux clients without issues. Windows uses SMB, the others use NFS. Ocasionally I use SMB with OSX as well. It's all working fine. I actually started on FreeNAS, but had problems with Crashplan. It just doesn't work well on FreeNAS, but works flawlessly on my Linux setup. I just run it in a container and it manages backups for all the clients. There are some web based tools to help admin a setup like this, WebMin comes to mind.

If you're willing to use something like Crashplan, rather than Time Machine, my setup style can work for you. Frankly, Apple doesn't seem all that interested in Time Machine. I think they plan to replace it with snapshot support in the new filesystem. If it were ZFS, you could ZFS Send those to the server, that would be ideal. sigh. And the download caching for OSX/IOS. Is that a big thing for you? One option is a transparent proxy like Squid. That would cache everything.

Sorry for the wall of text, just trying to help you out with some ideas..

I have to disagree

under openzfs.. not every fork is doing the same thing the same way.. and certain feature flags if implmented on a pool will make it unloadable in another version that doesnt support it even as read only..

SMB/CIFS/samba/nfs etc has different quirks, versions, and features depending on the operating system and is a complete mess... again.. everybody ****s with a 'standard' until its no longer standardized

agree on apples new file system... did we need something new... yes.. did they have to invent it from scratch.. hell no.. it takes more than 5 years to mature a file system... I am sure its going to be a 5 fingered mongolian clusterfuck...

as for linux based zfs ... its the worst offender for not following the rest of openzfs

unless of course you talk about how freenas does stupid shit like striping its own swap file across partitions on each disk in a zfs pool (worst practices addition) instead of using the whole dev. oh .. and if a drive goes down it kernal panics the whole ****ing show... you can disable swap but you cant disable freenas from partitioning disks put into pools...

all the solutions I get to fix what has worked for years on a single box running a cheap gigabyte destop board is a rube goldberg machine on steroids...

ignoring the obvious that the industry is going sideways.. and in many cases backwards...

one of the reasons I stay in the 'apple' lane is that things generally tended to work together but after Jobs... the clowns running that ship are steering it into the rocks... I give apple 3 more years in the computer space after that it will be a phone maker and thats it.. even microcrap's tablets are surpasing apple ...

rant over!!

thanks for helping ttable.. no light on you man.. just getting pissed...

 

[ttabbal]

I get being pissed about it man, it sucks. I still don't understand WTF the FreeNAS guys were thinking with that swap setup. Setting it up as a vdev and using that, maybe. At least then you have some protection. The whole point of RAID is increasing availability. Crashing the host because a single disk in the array died is insane. The excuse that you shouldn't be using swap anyway is just as nuts. If that's the case, default swap to OFF then!

At work they started giving out Surface Pro and Surface Book devices. As a programmer, I was really worried. I'm pleasantly surprised. Performance is great. Sure, a desktop i7 would probably smoke it, but for a portable, particularly a tablet, I'm impressed. And I'm NOT a fan of MS. Even battery life is quite good. And Windows 10 doesn't suck as much as I expected either.

Interoperability is going to become a bigger issue over time as more people start using different manufacturers and OSes. I'm shocked to say it, but honestly, MS is making the most progress of late with being more compatible and at least documenting some of their stupidity. There's even the UNIX shell stuff they are building out. They have a long way to go, certainly, but it's not something I expected to see happen, ever. And they start out in the back of the pack due to the weird crap they've been pulling for decades, but it's better than nothing.

When it comes to getting at least some communication out of the weird random shit that is out there, I have the best luck with Linux. It seems to be able to at least manage to do something when other stuff just flat out refuses to talk. It's far from perfect too, but it seems to be one of the better options for a server that needs to talk to a lot of different setups. And, other than Windows, it seems to have the best hardware support.

I feel for you man, your situation is one of the worst ones to be in. Coming from a somewhat simple setup and having to jump into a complex one. If it helps, that is one advantage of the container setups. You can focus on a single container doing a single thing, like getting Plex server running. Then you start a new one to do something else, it isolates changes so you're less likely to break Plex while trying to get a backup setup running.

 

[Avery Freeman]

I would love to just run OSX on the metal on this new hardware (dual 5640s) but my lsi 9212 has no OSX driver and I dont feel like buying a multi hundred atto to do the same thing as this $50 card

FWIW, I used to run OSX Lion on a Supermicro X7DVL-E motherboard with a couple Xeon L5520s. Supermicro Intel boards might actually be good Hackintosh candidates. You can look up a Hackintosh HCL and piece together something that will work well. Many storage controllers and graphics cards aimed at the PC market work as well.