Media System Software on my ESXi Server?

kirkster

kirkster

kirkster

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What's the best software, hopefully free, to use for media/NAS/streaming purposes? It needs to run on a VM on my ESXI Whitebox server I am building. It needs to be left running 24x7 so if it an help keep the power down by spinning down the disks etc then so much the better.
Appreciate some ideas you guys have done please!
 
There's quite a few options out there - I've tried a few, and have always gone back to Serviio, as it's the only one that's been 100% reliable (as in once it's up, I never ever have to do anything with it).

There's versions for Windows and Linux - both extremely simple to set up.
 
I use plex.

I have an esx host in my parents house, left it there when I moved out as I was my network and still pay part of the bill for the 80/20 fibre,n moved into shared acomodation near work with not so great ADSL.

Anyways I have a few vms running for various things but I use Plex.

I VPN in to my network where the host lives and stream movies over the internet to where I am now, its a good piece of software, good interface and easy to setup.

I'm running it on a windows server 2008 box but hopefully migrating across to Ubuntu when I get some time to sort out an Ubuntu VM for it
 
unraid with plex plugin

unraid for nas (it will power down drives when not in use) (though you will have to pass through the disk controller to unraid to let it power down)

free for 3 disks .
 
I think Plex is the pretty slick and best choice, but NAS4FREE is an option and that has a Puppies plugin, very simple to setup. I have heard suggestions that Plex can be ported to NAS4FREE but I've never tried it.

Running NAS4Free or any other OS as VM you are probably going to need to give direct access to your physical disks, although it's not for the fainthearted:eek:

See http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/SATA_RDMs.php

I've got this to work and my ZFS RAID 4*2Tbyte drives spin up and down as it goes through its power saving phases, but I can't get SMART to work. Add an SSD as a disk cache and the drives only spin up if the data isn't cached. The SSD has one draw back, if power fails you loose all data on the SSD that hasn't been written back to the main RAID.
 
I tried creating RDMs under ESXi 5.5 to a NAS4Free install and nothing seemed to work.
Although the VMs could see the drives, they declared they were all 0 bytes. Something to do with the drivers inside BSD.

I'm still running NAS4Free successfully enough on virtual disks under ESXi.
 
skyripper said:
I tried creating RDMs under ESXi 5.5 to a NAS4Free install and nothing seemed to work.
Click to expand...

I had this on another ESX host (Intel) which has 3 1Tbyte drives, never sorted it out? I think you could be right, maybe a driver issue? This is an old motherboard with an i3 CPU and does NOT support VMware hardware passthrough.

The ESX server it works on has an AMD A10 cpu on the latest motherboard (A88X chipset) which supports VMWare hardware passthrough.

Not sure if this makes a difference, haven't had chance to resolve or even look into the problem, busy being Daddy taxi to two teenage girls
 
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