Server one is out of space and I'm slowly building up my new server but I can't afford to get fill it with drives so it's a slow process. Since tower1 is out of space though I'd like to start using tower2 for new stuff but have tower1 have access to it. Is this easily/reliable possible? Ideally once I have the space on tower2 I'd like to move entire shares over to tower2 while tower2 still reads it. Thoughts?

Unassigned devices plugin can map smb shares to local paths.

Server one is out of space and I'm slowly building up my new server but I can't afford to get fill it with drives so it's a slow process. Since tower1 is out of space though I'd like to start using tower2 for new stuff but have tower1 have access to it. Is this easily/reliable possible? Ideally once I have the space on tower2 I'd like to move entire shares over to tower2 while tower2 still reads it. Thoughts?

Use unassigned devices plugin to be able to access the shares on tower1 from tower2  (mount an SMB share)

 

You'll wind up adding another volume mapping to your docker containers (Plex et al) that require access to tower1 (eg: /tower1Media mapped to /mnt/disks/whateverItIs)

This seems like a reliable way to scale - make a server, fill 'er up, make a new one, point it to the old one... I may consider doing this. Only downside is that license fees will accumulate. Still, good plan.

I get better performance if I use NFS to mount the secondary server's share instead of SMB, still using the Unassigned Devices plugin.

 

Wow, that works great! Thanks. I just shared a share on tower2 using NFS and using that plugin was able to mount it on tower1. Works great.

Test the shutdown behavior before you leave it unattended for long periods of time. I think this issue was supposed to be fixed, but several months ago when I was messing with it the machine with the foreign mount assigned would hang if the slave machine went offline first.