I have a Xeon 18 core 36 thread beast of a server that runs Ubuntu 22.04 serving smbd and Jellyfin (HW transcoding with the NV quadro P200). It has 5 x 2TB spinning discs in RAID5 for all of the data and an NVMe as the boot drive.
Will I lose any performance by installing Proxmox on this machine and then TrueNAS scale and Jellyfin as VM’s?
I’m attracted to more flexibility with Proxmox but don’t want to affect the disk read performance when sharing to the network clients.
Any experiences or advice would be welcomed.
Yes, there will be some performance loss (but probably not a lot) and there will also be a lot more complexity as you need to pass through the devices.
I’m a huge fan of Proxmox, but if you currently have a setup you like, I wouldn’t switch the base OS. Ubuntu is perfectly capable of hosting the same KVM virtual machines and you can even get a decent web UI with cockpit.
Either way, I’d virtualize or containerize Jellyfin.
If a switch to Proxmox is desired (there’s a lot to like about it), I think I’d skip the TrueNAS VM. I went the TrueNAS VM route years ago and it worked flawlessly, but it can lead to some complicated acrobatics if you want PVE to have access to the storage that TrueNAS controls. Instead, what I usually do is have PVE manage the ZFS storage and use an LXC container to do SMB and NFS sharing of a directory I’ve given it for that purpose. Works like a charm.
I would expect the RAID 5 to affect the performance if you virtualise - RAID 10 is better for random r/w performance, as VM’s tend to be, but you obviously lose some capacity
Well this week I bit the bullet. After backing up all the data to some spare drives I did a fresh install of Proxmox and enabled PCI pass through after finally finding the correct option in the Lenovo bios.
Next was TrueNAS scale with the 5x HDD wiped and formatted in raid Z1 with pass through direct to the VM. All the datasets were created to resemble the previous shares and then shared again by SMB.
Then Ubuntu server VM was installed to host Jellyfin with the GPU passed through for transcoding.
The result is a total success. TrueNAS seems to support sharing to Windows, MacOS and iOS better than the previous native SMB service. Plus I’m able to run a few extra VM’s and keep them on the lab VLAN because I made Proxmox ‘VLAN aware’.
You don’t mention if you are using a single onboard NIC or/and using a NIC card.
Using proxmox I’d recommend adding additional ports, a quad intel port can be had for cheap. On my machine I have Proxmox UI mapped to the onboard NIC and my quad card mapped to my vlans in a LAGG.
I’ve had two occasions where I’ve done an update to Proxmox and it messed up the networking, the quad ports needed to be remapped. No idea why it happened.
Obviously you can pass LAN and vlan traffic via a single NIC, however in an emergency I could spin up pfsense and use proxmox as a router without limiting speeds.
Amazing! I was using the onboard NIC but wanted to dedicate a connection to TrueNAS so I rummaged through my parts bin and found an Intel Pro1000 MT. Good enough for now and I installed it at the weekend.
Then today I was browsing for a quad port equivalent. What a coincidence.
Frustrated though that components in the US are much cheaper than over here in Europe.