Looking into making an ingest/disk shelf secondary server


Eddyall

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Due to slight error, I'm ending up with 4 PCIe device in a server that can accommodate 3. I wanted to add an HBA card but I forgot to account for the 10Gbps NIC I have installed. I'll be looking into how I could use a single video card non-concurrently for transcoding in Jellyfin and used in VMs but in the mean time, an option I was thinking about was to use my old gaming rig I decommissioned last year to rip BluRays/DVDs and free a SATA port on the MB of my Unraid machine.

However sometime that would also be interesting would be to use it as a disk shelf/DAS. My old rig uses an i5-2500k (old old rig) so if the idea is doable I might upgrade the MB/CPU/RAM eventually but since I'll have the HBA I was thinking of using the case to hold HDDs. I have 4 in that rig which health probably aren't amazing but were still working fine. Ideally I would want everything to be controlled by the Unraid server but that's not imperative.

 

The easiest way to do this would be to install another version of Unraid on the old rig and set up a SMB share from what I know/have researched, but I wanted to check with others if there was other options I could look into/pursue. The goal isn't necessarily to be optimal but reuse old hardware and have fun with it.

Thank you plenty

Edited by Eddyall
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Current Config

Unraid Server
-AMD Ryzen 7 3800X 8-Core
-Gigabyte X570 AORUS PRO WIFI
-2*16GB RAM
-GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER
-Radeon RX 570
-ASUS NIC XG-C100C
-ASUS BW-16D1HT
-1*8TB+4*4TB HDDs
-1 500GB PCIe 3.0 NVME (Main cache)
-1 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVME (VM cache)

Old Rig
-Intel i5-2500k
-Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3
-2*8GB RAM (DDR3-1600)
-GeForce GTX 570
-A DVD writer from ASUS
-2*1TB+1*500GB+1*~250GB HDDs

Extra part
-LSI 9207-4i4e SAS HBA
-1 8TB HDD

Edited by Eddyall
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I'm sorry, I'm trying to follow this but somehow I'm not quite there -- what specifically are you looking into feedback on?

 

Software suites, or configuration tips? Or more of a "put X items in server a, Y in server B" and so forth? More of just a sanity check?

 

 

6 hours ago, Eddyall said:

how I could use a single video card for transcoding in Jellyfin and used in VMs but in the mean time,

The only thing I can directly comment on is this part.

- First, Jellyfin is a fantastic project, and I'm sure you know it forked from Emby originally. I also tried the Jellyfin route, and thusfar I actually haven't had good experiences with it. I'm actually interested in your experiences with this, as if it's improved I might use it as a fallback -- I have an Emby Premiere account, and my experiences have made it worth the Lifetime license. Primarily though, I mention this because I'm interested in hearing if you have a good experience with Jellyfin, and your feelings of that experience vs Emby, if you have any.

- Second, unfortunately (and this isn't just an Unraid limitation) -- you can't. Not simultaniously, and given the on-demand nature of Jellyfin that's just asking for misery. You can only use a GPU in a VM as a passthrough device (someone correct me if I'm wrong) and this will make it effectively unavailable to Unraid's use, full stop. Professional GPUs support things such as SR-IOV where instances of their function can be split between multiple virtual hosts and other fun tricks, but consumer-grade GPUs, to my knowledge, universally do not support this featureset.

 

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12 hours ago, codefaux said:

I'm sorry, I'm trying to follow this but somehow I'm not quite there -- what specifically are you looking into feedback on?

 

Software suites, or configuration tips? Or more of a "put X items in server a, Y in server B" and so forth? More of just a sanity check?

 

Ya I don't blame you, the optimal thing to do would really be to get a platform with more PCIe lane. I'm looking for either software suite or OS to turn the old gaming rig into something that will let me:

  1. Rip/ingest BluRay and DVDs from the old rig unto my server automaticly
  2. Act as a disk shelf for the server

Preferably I'd want something that I don't manage and can just be managed from the same GUI as my Unraid server, at least after setting it up properly. I know I could use Unraid on both machine but that would let the main Unraid instance access the second Unraid instance shares but not add the storage space into the main pool. ei it would make two NAS instead of one NAS linked to a DAS.

 

12 hours ago, codefaux said:

The only thing I can directly comment on is this part.

- First, Jellyfin is a fantastic project, and I'm sure you know it forked from Emby originally. I also tried the Jellyfin route, and thusfar I actually haven't had good experiences with it. I'm actually interested in your experiences with this, as if it's improved I might use it as a fallback -- I have an Emby Premiere account, and my experiences have made it worth the Lifetime license. Primarily though, I mention this because I'm interested in hearing if you have a good experience with Jellyfin, and your feelings of that experience vs Emby, if you have any.

- Second, unfortunately (and this isn't just an Unraid limitation) -- you can't. Not simultaniously, and given the on-demand nature of Jellyfin that's just asking for misery. You can only use a GPU in a VM as a passthrough device (someone correct me if I'm wrong) and this will make it effectively unavailable to Unraid's use, full stop. Professional GPUs support things such as SR-IOV where instances of their function can be split between multiple virtual hosts and other fun tricks, but consumer-grade GPUs, to my knowledge, universally do not support this featureset.

 

By the time I was installing stuff I'd heard about how Plex started free to use but that changed, Emby started as a fork but did the same and Jellyfin is the current project saying it'll stay free. So I did not try the other two. I followed Spaceinvader1's tutorials for it and so far it's working good, streaming to my phone and a couple computer stream at the same time in 1080p/720p mix worked for me. Think in total I did 5 stream which is 4 more than I really ever need. I did sometime have stutter when watching that went away by dropping the stream rate, haven't had issue since and I can't really tell the difference between 60 and 20 Mbps. I do it a bit more manual then it needs to be but I rip disk with MakeMKV to an ingest share, rename to season/episode sxxeyy in folder, move to movie or tvshow share, use sonarr/radarr to rename the file, by that time Jellyfin has picked everything up but I go in dashboard and do a library scan if I've imported a lot of stuff. The only thing that I've not had great luck sometime is the show being identified correctly but that's it. (and probably because the shows are anime when that happens)

For the GPU usage I did a slight error writing originally, the goal isn't to use the same GPU concurrently for transcodding and VMing, from what I know you're right a GPU can either do work for dockers (any amount) or be used in a VM. I'm searching for now, but I think to manage it I'd have to manually make sure to close the VM if I was opening Plex and vice versa, what I want would be for Jellyfin to recognize if GPU available do GPU transcode else do CPU transcode. I think that if the GPU disappear Jellyfin will need a reboot which isn't optimal and since my main rig is Linux I kinda want a Windows VM for game that aren't native/do not work in Proton.

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  • 2 years later...

I have the same cpu and mobo  I5-2500K and Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3. Currently using it as a Windows 7 drive pool rig. I am contemplating on converting it to a 2nd Unraid box however it would only be used as a Samba server. I  knew the I5-2500K supported vt-x but not vt-d. It is also my understanding the Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 mobo does not support vt-d, but does support vt-x. So replacing the 2500K with a I7-3770 would not accomplish much for pci passthrough. So vms would only using the virtual graphic card and not the physical Nvidia 650 TI Boost. I also have a spare Nvidia GTX 750 and GTX 1060 that I could use. But will not since vt-d is not supported.

Edited by Vetteman
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