General Guidance Sought For Network Organization

[silasfelinus]

First off, I am so impressed by this community, thank you anyone who has spent their time to help people like me, it means the world.

 

 

I have a dedicated machine running Unraid as a media server. My uses are 85% plex and 15% shared network folders for my home use.

 

Unraid as a single level one drive, which leads to the Plex directories, Download folder, and network folders. I am planning to evolve the system with Docker, but I would like some advice on where to place my various components.

 

I'm currently hosting Plex on a separate bare metal linux box with Jackett & Ombi. (I had Sabnzbd installed as well, but it has been disabled due to issues I'm hoping will be resolved in the new restructuring). I have another Windows 10 machine behind a VPN, running Sonarr, Radarr, QBtorrent, and a separate Plex server hosting local files.

 

My plan is to setup Docker on the Linux and Windows machines, plus another Windows  (I was told separating Sonarr and Radarr could help performance).  I can easily add more Windows machines if it would help lighten the load, at the expense of a little convenience.

 

Couple questions:

Is there a current reason to install Docker on my Unraid machine? It's a basic NAS killer 4.0 type build, no graphics card. Should I install any of the apps I mentioned on the Unraid box itself for a more optimized setup? Are there any Docker apps or Unraid plugins I should be looking at to help with this build? Is there any better way to divide up my apps?

 

 

I'm slowly learning my way, everything has started intimidating, but I'm getting better at reading manuals and checking error logs every day. Thank you all for the help and patience!

 

 

 

[JonathanM]

14 minutes ago, silasfelinus said:

It's a basic NAS killer 4.0 type build

CPU? Memory? Drives?

[silasfelinus]

2 hours ago, jonathanm said:

CPU? Memory? Drives?

NAS: Intel Core i5-3570S 3.1 GHz Quad-Core, 16gb RAM, 10 drives averaging 8tb each, a single 10tb as parity array, and 2 SSD’s (240gb and 480gb) making up a 360gb cache pool.

 

My linux box is a supermicro x9scm with 16gb RAM, running off a 1tb ssd and using a 500gb ssd as a plex cache.

 

windows box 1 is a i7-4790k 4gz, 16gb RAM, 980TI , 500SSD boot, random hard drives (my gaming rig and vpn download box)

 

windows box 2: i3-9100 3.6GHz, 16 GB RAM, 240GB SSD boot, random hard drive (my coding machine)

[silasfelinus]

And sorry I neglected to mention: Unraid version 6.9.1

[JonathanM]

First, when you have a cache pool with 2 members, the amount of space available with the default RAID1 config is equal to the smaller of the 2, because each piece of data must be duplicated on a different member. BTRFS free and used space numbers are a work in progress, the display is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong.

 

While the CPU you have in the Unraid box is older, I don't see any reason why you couldn't run all your acquiring and organizational apps as containers on Unraid. If plex isn't doing any transcoding it would run comfortably on Unraid as well. If you are serving more than 1 client, and if any are remote or need transcoding, then you need more CPU, so leaving the current plex server would be better.

 

The amount of CPU needed for the 'arrs and related pieces aren't really very significant, I think it would be better to keep the traffic all in one box vs. doing it on different boxes and moving it around the LAN.

[silasfelinus]

35 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

First, when you have a cache pool with 2 members, the amount of space available with the default RAID1 config is equal to the smaller of the 2, because each piece of data must be duplicated on a different member. BTRFS free and used space numbers are a work in progress, the display is pretty much guaranteed to be wrong.

 

While the CPU you have in the Unraid box is older, I don't see any reason why you couldn't run all your acquiring and organizational apps as containers on Unraid. If plex isn't doing any transcoding it would run comfortably on Unraid as well. If you are serving more than 1 client, and if any are remote or need transcoding, then you need more CPU, so leaving the current plex server would be better.

 

The amount of CPU needed for the 'arrs and related pieces aren't really very significant, I think it would be better to keep the traffic all in one box vs. doing it on different boxes and moving it around the LAN.

 

 

The plex server is active and heavy with transcoding, so it can stay on the linux box. I like the idea of everything else being served on the nas. That's a radical suggestion as it goes, and saves me a few problems making sure the active computers are running daily.

 

I've definitely been constrained in my conception so far, as my system has evolved piece by piece, and I'm used to divide and conquer. Sounds like Docker really might be the level up I've been looking for.

 

Thank you so much for the reply!