ditching xpenology, go plain linux?

Amleto · 30 Nov 2020 at 21:51

I have a hp gen8 that I put esxi and xpenology on it, expecting that I would be able to set it up and just leave it. I mainly use it for plex and backup. But now the plex server version is being obsoleted and various apps will shortly no longer work with it (it requires o/s upgrade to get newer server versions).

I don't want to faff around with those bootloaders and xpenology upgrade issues so thinking to just blow the media away and start from scratch. The backups are small enough that I can copy to local machine first, and they're also copied to S3.

So I'm wondering if I should go plain linux to avoid these 'app store'/os upgrade issues, or if something like freenas/zfs is going to be friendlier and still avoid said issues?

edit:
Just read about freenas + virtualization... probably more fuss than I'm after. So I only have plain linux for easy street on esxi?

ahenners · 16 Jan 2021 at 16:04

I was in a similar position a few months ago due to the Plex version in Xpenology being left behind. I still think Xpenology works well as a NAS and for backup, so kept it but created a Ubuntu VM with Plex server installed. The shares are mounted from Xpenology in the Ubuntu VM so Plex can access the media. Seems to work well. I'm running Hyper-V as my hypervisor but you should be able to do the same fairly easily on esxi.

Avalon · 18 Jan 2021 at 15:50

Ignoring that Xpenology is just blatant piracy, you could roll your own, I really like Ubuntu+docker with mergeFS and SnapRAID for this kind of usage, but you are stuck on the LTS cycle, UnRAID is potentially a better fit, but depends on IO requirements. Realistically though the micro server is not an ideal Plex server unless you can avoid transcoding.

Randall8686 · 21 Jan 2021 at 10:44

I went with Unraid, I also run a Xpenology VM within unraid for a few simple things (i have a genuine synology as well) but unraid has been amazing, with a brilliant community too. I got a nvidia 1060 and chucked that in to handle all the plex transcoding and it works perfectly with zero load on the cpu during transcoding.