Hello, I'm avoiding FreeNAS and Rockstor and am setting up a ZFS RAID and shares the hard way I guess.
I need help getting Plex to see my ZFS datasets. Setup is as follows: z800 with ESXi 6
VM with Ubuntu Server, samba, NFS and ZFS installed, RAIDZ with 5 2TB HDDs. Created a pool /mnt/bank, within that folders such as Movies, Music etc.
VM with Ubuntu 14.04 desktop installed and Plex installed. The Ubuntu UI can see the share drives from Ubuntu server, but Plex cannot. In fact I put a USB 3.0 card in passthrough to this VM so that I could drag and drop all the media content from an external HDD to the ZFS datasets, no issue.
I'm surprised at the lack of results I can find with google, seems everyone just uses FreeNAS, or Plex and NFS/Samba shares, but I think I introduced a lot of complexity using ZFS data sets, NFS, Samba, compartmentalizing the RAID server from the Plex server etc. I'm a newb so I've played with changing folder permissions and such, but nothing seems to work.
How does your Ubuntu 14.04 desktop VM get access to the shares? Are you using NFS to share the ZFS datasets between VMs?
I have a FreeNAS VM on my ESXi box that handles my storage and shares various datasets via NFS and Samba. For Plex I have a Centos 7 VM dedicated to the purpose that mounts the NFS share where my media files are located.
Here is the line from /etc/fstab for the NFS mount: 192.168.1.5:/mnt/main_storage/media /srv/nas_media nfs auto,noatime,nolock,bg 0 0
I'm able to see the mount location from the Plex web interface and add the correct folders to their respective libraries. Sounds like you may have a permissions issue where the Plex user can't read the media folder. On Centos, Plex Media Server runs as the user plex. Here are the permissions on my media folder mount point: drwxrwxr-x. 10 nobody nobody 11 Oct 7 18:54 nas_media
Here is what my Plex interface shows for my Movie library:
Didn't see a reason to bother figuring out jails when I could just spin up another VM in ESXi. I've got more RAM than I need(48gb) in the system so the extra resources don't make much difference. Also ESXi makes it easy to keep Plex from hogging so much CPU that the NAS and Firewall quit working properly. Here's my VM list:
I installed FreeNAS 10 Beta2 for fun, it imported my ZFS pool without issue, that was pretty cool. The UI is nice and it has some features I will poke into more- an ESXi datastore backup feature caught my eye.
I tried to spin up a docker, a message popped up that my CPU does not support virtualization, so whatever they are using for dockers doesn't allow for virtualizing ontop of virtualizing I guess, interestingly Rockstor's dockers still worked- guess this forces my hand to spin up a different VM for Plex, OwnCloud/NextCloud etc.
"UPS Monitor", have a VM spun up to do a graceful shutdown in case of a power outage? I've been wanted to get hot on this and have been sitting on the following URLs but haven't gotten to it... https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=25984.0
The UPS Monitor VM is a VM provided by CyberPower(I use a CyberPower 1300va UPS) for doing graceful shutdown of ESXi systems. The VM works pretty well; I've already had it do one shutdown during a power outage. It has a web interface to configure it, but I haven't touched it since the initial install. The VM is technically designed for their commercial UPS units, but it works with their consumer models just fine too. I also had to configure ESXi to shutdown the VMs in the correct order with correct delays when it gets the shutdown signal from the UPS monitor. Also the USB device for the UPS has to be passed to the VM.
bah humbug, I have an APC and to do the same thing, one needs to follow those URLs to setup VMs that basically make the windows version of the software work with tasks/scripts to gracefully shutdown ESXi- granted you setup the shutdowns in the right order and timing in ESXi's menu.
