New Desktop - Windows 10, Linux or ESXi?

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Handle9

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#243782 31-Dec-2018 22:40

I’m building a new system for home as my existing machine is having some hardware issues.

The machine is a bit of a Swiss Army knife - it’s our Plex server with 10TB of storage, runs a few desktop apps and it would be nice to move Pihole from the existing Raspberry Pi.

Historically I’ve just run windows 10 but I’m wondering whether running Linux and VMs would give a bit more resiliency and versatility. I’ve never played with Linux so I’m interested in different options.

The new machine is a Ryzen 5 2600 with 16gb of RAM initially so should have the horsepower to run a few VMs.

gehenna

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#2152811 1-Jan-2019 00:26

Unraid FTW

michaelmurfy

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#2152816 1-Jan-2019 02:18

Yep UnRaid is what I recommend also. Can docker all the things and also run VM’s too. It is great as a simple NAS.

I have got quite a bit running on mine:

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Handle9

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#2152819 1-Jan-2019 05:07

Unraid looks interesting.

As well as the 4 storage drives I've got 2 x 250gb ssds from a couple of old projects. For decent performance would I be best to use one as the cache and the other outside of the array for VMs?

Handle9

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#2155444 6-Jan-2019 20:46

I built the machine and copied in my data to the array yesterday. It's now building parity which I guess will take all week (8TB parity disk). Plex is running nicely and I'll start building some VMS and Radarr/Sonarr etc tonight.

Thanks for the advice it seems really intuitive to use and powerful. I haven't played with dockers before either so that is cool to try as well :)

gehenna

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#2155464 6-Jan-2019 21:48

Handle9: Unraid looks interesting.

As well as the 4 storage drives I've got 2 x 250gb ssds from a couple of old projects. For decent performance would I be best to use one as the cache and the other outside of the array for VMs?

That's what I do. I don't need parity on my cache disk, so I have a 500GB cache SSD and a 240GB SSD that sits outside the array with Windows 10 VM on it, and a couple other things.

michaelmurfy

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#2155465 6-Jan-2019 21:48

Make sure you install the app store if you haven't already :)

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/38582-plug-in-community-applications/

Handle9

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#2155468 6-Jan-2019 21:52

Community apps is all setup - I've watched about a million hours of spaceinvaderones youtube channel this week which I found super useful.

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gehenna

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#2155472 6-Jan-2019 22:02

Handle9:

I haven't played with dockers before either so that is cool to try as well :)

Use the Plex docker, much easier than having the PMS run in a VM.

Handle9

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#2155475 6-Jan-2019 22:08

gehenna:

Use the Plex docker, much easier than having the PMS run in a VM.

Done - it's definitely a pretty easy way to install plex. It also seems to run much more happily on Linux that windows, although that may just have been my older hardware not running that fast.

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#2155519 7-Jan-2019 06:50

It's just nice to have it running independently of a desktop OS in my case. So much easier to bring things up and take them down without impacting Plex uptime. I used to use Tautulli for Plex statistics but they've built the basics into PMS now.

Another tip, ControlR is a great iOS app that let's you access and control your Unraid containers and array tools. You need to install the plugin on the server but that's all. Not sure if it's Android too.

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#2220108 17-Apr-2019 18:50

So 3 months in to Unraid now. I had UnRaid doing some weird stuff so decided to restore from a backup this morning. It was approximately 15 minutes from shutting the array to being back up and running.

I'm very happy, thanks all.