I’m relatively experienced with esxi and trying to figure out the best way to set up a Plex server. To preface, I’m extremely inexperienced with networking and have a bare surface level grasp of the topics. I currently have 10 drives set up with a hardware RAID controller on RAID6 and I’m confused where to go from here. Is it possible to create a VM with TrueNAS that uses the RAID6 array or would it just be better to have the Plex server VM use the RAID6 array directly?
I’ve read some things that TrueNAS should have its own hardware controller or something? I have no idea… lost in the infinite ocean of forums spitting jargon. Please try to keep it on the simpler side.
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The hardware controller bit is something i do. So I run Proxmox. I think you can do it in Esxi, but proxmox might be worth at least looking into. Plex is in a VM and TrueNAS is in a VM. My SSDs attached to my motherboard have my OS and VMs. My nas drives are connected to an HBA PCIe card. In my case that’s a Dell H740 but a H310 is good to if you need to buy one. They are like $30. The HBA card connects either to a Backplane for hot swap drives or you can get sas to 4x sata breakout cables. All of your NAS drives, probably rust spinners, would connect to the HBA card. In Proxmox we can configure to give the HBA card to the TrueNAS VM so the virtual machine has direct control over the physical PCIe card. This is called PCIe Passthrough. In this configuration Proxmox does not have control over the HBA card hence why the OS drives can’t be connected to it as any drives connected to the HBA card are also controlled by the VM the HBA is passed through to. Once in TrueNAS shares can be setup be it for personal files or Plex media. This give you best of both worlds between having 1 server to do everything and being able to run TrueNAS with physical hardware access.
Proxmox is its own type of hypervisor right? So since I use esxi I’d need to look for the PCIe passthrough setup you mentioned in the configs. Thank you for explaining what “passthrough” actually meant and where it is in the whole equation. I understand how your setup works, but for the moment I think I’ll continue using my hardware RAID card until I run into any issues.
Gonna throw out JBOD with MS Storage Spaces (storage pool). I am running a 3 tier with 8 10TB drives. No drama for over 4 years.
TrueNAS needs direct access to drives to ensure proper corruption detection and repair which is not possible with a hardware RAID controller. But if you’re on ESXi, you could just deploy a Linux VM with Plex on a hardware RAID datastore.