Best way to split up jobs like Sonarr/Sabnzbd/etc. between FreeNAS and a separate media server?

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knidsrok

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My original plan was to just let FreeNAS handle storage, and have my media server run Plex/Sab/Sonarr/et al. but I've realized it's not quite as simple as all that.

If Sonarr, Radarr & Sabnzbd are running on a separate machine, do I set up local destination folders, and then have files moved over to the NAS during post-processing?

Or is it better to have them download directly to folders on the NAS, which would avoid an unnecessary transfer over the local network -- but would require reliable server-side copying and more complex permissioning to let the programs from the media server enact the unpacking and post-processing of data already on the NAS.

Or is it better to have everything start and finish over on the FreeNAS server, and run Sonarr/Sabnzbd, et al. as plugins, which might be less complicated, but also might unnecessarily burden the NAS?

Does anybody else run this kind of split setup, and if so, how do you have it configured?
 

danb35

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Unless your FreeNAS box is severely resource-constrained (which it doesn't look like it should be), it seems that the simplest path is to run those apps on it. I run them in a single jail along with Radarr and Transmission.
 

toadman

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Or unless you require high performance, it probably doesn't matter. I virtualize everything. FreeNAS (as a NAS only), and a separate PVR running Sonarr, Radar, transmission, Jackett, etc., services. Even running on different hosts I don't have a performance or network issue with network transfers, etc. Then again, I'm not really looking for high performance on that stuff, and I don't have any significant post processing. Plex runs in another separate VM (along with some reporting services) and stores it's libraries on it's local .vmdk (which is backed by a FreeNAS NFS share). The media libraries are accessed via SMB shares mounted on the linux VMs.

The reason I split the media player (Plex in my case) from the PVR stuff is that Plex is "high priority, high compute" (when doing multiple transcodes) while the PVR is "low priority, low compute, essentially background services". In addition the PVR routes through a VPN where Plex does not. So that was a natural separation for me as it's easier to manage the compute needs on the cluster. Just easier to manage it all with the firewall and vm priority on the host vs. doing it on the server (vm) itself.
 
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knidsrok

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Well, considering I've never dealt with jails and iocages before, and that I already have my PVR/media player set up in it's own metal-and-silicon, non-virtual machine, the simplest solution for me would be to leave Plex, Sab, etc. where they are on said AM (Actual Machine), and just change all the destination folders to point to mounted SMB shares from my FreeNAS server.

All that would require is for me to set up my Plex/PVR machine to mount persistent SMB shares at start-up, and then go into the Plex and the PVR apps and change the base paths of the relevant folders to the FreeNAS shares.

Any reason why this would be a bad idea?
 

toadman

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If it ain't broke, don't fix it. :)

Seems like a completely reasonable idea to do what you are suggesting as the simplest solution.
 
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