Plex Plugin or Manual Install in Jail?

[Sharky23]

I've been running FreeNAS and Plex server separately for many years. I'm about due for a complete hardware refresh for both and would like to condense the footprint a bit. I'll be north of 60 usable TB on the updated build and plan to supply the appropriate amount of memory to appease FreeNAS. Plex relies very little on memory so it can tie up the cores/threads I throw into the box and everyone should be happy. I see plenty of simple tutorials out there for installing Plex manually into a jail instead of using the plugin but with little or no explanation as to why this is beneficial. Other than the delay in Plex updates to the plugin, is there any other tangible benefit? Also, I've seen a few posts from people that setup a RAM disk on their FreeNAS boxes and the associated comments saying that it's a good or bad idea but has anyone done this and passed it through to Plex to use as a transcoding drive?

 

[Jailer]

Ease of keeping plex up to date is the biggest advanage of a manual install vs plugin.

Not sure what you mean by ram disk, FreeNAS doesnt support RAM disks.

 

[nightshade00013]

There are a couple benefits IMHO and one is glaringly obvious. If you installed it you will have a better idea how to fix it. Plus you can choose when and how to update rather than waiting on someone else to do it for you then push it out.

As far as RAM disks, it can be done with a piece of hardware that utilizes ram but it will be of little use for a streaming server. And you CAN create a RAM disk in FreeNAS but it's not a good idea to do that and it will have no benefit with a good amount of risk involved.

With that said some people have chosen to increase the resource usage of their Plex install by setting it up inside a Linux VM hosted on FreeNAS. You can do a lot of different things to make it work, ultimately what is best is in the eye of the beholder. I run Plex in a jail so I can do things with it on my schedule with a minimum impact of resources while forgoing a lot of trivial features.

 

[Sharky23]

With multiple simultaneous transcodes, I'm thinking I'll go the VM route. Any idea how FreeNAS allocates resources to Jails by comparison?

 

[nightshade00013]

A jail has access to the full system at this point, for transcoding on the fly you will be reducing your ability using a VM as you should never dedicate every core nor every bit of RAM to a VM. Plus VM performance for the drives is further reduced compared to a jail.

 

[Sharky23]

I won't be reusing any existing hardware for this build so I may setup both options and test performance between them to see which will be a better fit. My performance hurdle has always been on the Plex server's CPU so I don't know that the performance reduction on the drive side of a VM would be a significant concern. On a 16-core build I'd be looking to allocate 12 to Plex with minimal RAM. As usual, ECC RAM with Xeon processors (unless someone has seen good performance out of Ryzen).

 

[myrandomtips]

Did a small video on how I installed mine in a jail.

https://www.myrandomtips.com/linux/freenas/how-to-install-plex-media-server-on-freenas-11-2/