Jails vs. Plugins vs. Bhyve - Which to choose for 'most stable' mediaserver(s)?

[mwittemans]

Hi all,

Would like to reach out to the community and have your thouhts on 'Jails vs. Plugins vs. Bhyve (Ubuntu 18.4 LST & Docker CE) - Which to choose for 'most stable' mediaserver(s)?'...

I'm currently running a very stable FreeNas-11.1-U7 (see specs in signature) and would like to 'upgrade' to FreeNas-11.2.U4 soon. I'm targetting to install 11.2.U4 on a new boot device, import the existing pools, and rebuild all 'media' servers from scratch (to get rid of the warden jails).

With 11.2.U4 we now have a vast choice between running 'servers' using Jails vs. Plugins vs. Bhyve (Ubuntu 18.4 LST & Docker CE), and, although I understand pro's and con's of each, I can't seem to made the appropriate choice for running 'Portainer / Plex / Tantuilly / Sonarr / Radarr / Lidarr / Transmission' where the priority is a stable and performant system based on my specs.

Out of testing on my VM I have following observations:
Iocage Jails
Working great in 11.2.U4, is what I'm familiar with as in my current build I'm running the above in (warden) jails. Like the fact you can stop/start individual 'servers/services' and one jail does not halt/kill any other jail. But configuration, maintenance and update effort is high and not automated, and uses probably more resource than Bhyve (I'm not sure about that last statement....)

PlugIns
Very easy to install and maintain, however not enough customisable (I require integration between the servers/services and it's not easy to configue 'data locations'). Additonally slow(er) updates, depending on 3rd party to provide updates (which is not bad as stability is important, but so are new features and bugfixes).

Bhyve (Ubuntu 18.4 LST & Docker CE)
Very stable OS, lot's of support, guidance and flexibility in configuration. Docker CE (and docker compose) very easy to configure, and to deploy! (ease of testing in VM and then simply deploy to prod). Excellent repositories on Github (lot's of pre-configured containers, with excellent support). However, all running on 1 Bhyve VM (no redundancy, if VM goes down (misconfiguration/failed upgrades, corrupt FS/...) all services are lost!. Backup and Restore more difficult (snapshots available?), and unknown if that 'single' VM needs more resources than different iocage Jails...

Anyone any experiences, guidance, additional information which may help me in the selection of the 'Which to choose for 'most stable' mediaserver(s)?'

Personally I was thinking; Plex in Bhyve (Ubuntu 18.4 LST). All other servers/services in Bhyve (Ubuntu 18.4 LST & Docker CE), whcih is 2 Bhyve VM's.... on a 16GB FreeNAS where Ubuntu VM will need 4 GB to run... leaving a bare minimum for FreeNAS which is not recommended.

 

[adrianwi]

A plugin is an Iocage jail, just without having to think. It also means you're in the hands of the plugin maintainer for updates, so might be a little/lot behind the latest version. It's not difficult to create your own jail and install your media player of choice.

The two main media players - emby and plex - both play well inside a jail, and the overhead of running a Bhyve VM seems unnecessary, at least to me anyway.

 

[sretalla]

Well, plugins are jails, so no need to differentiate except for the responsibility of who will manage the updates. You can customize a plugin jail just as much as a regular one (with the risk that an update harms your customization).

uses probably more resource than Bhyve (I'm not sure about that last statement....)

Not only should you not be sure, you have it backwards... Bhyve is far less efficient in resource usage than jails (you have the entire virtualized OS and allocated memory in addition to the host OS).

The nullfs mounts offered by jails are by far the best (fastest and lowest resource consumption) access you can get to your storage from a server process.