Plex for home video serving

 The first service I installed on my home server was Plex.  Back during the time of Blockbuster, we decided to purchase movies rather than rent them if there was a chance that we would want to watch them more than once.  We ended up with over 400, and have long ago stored them in books and thrown out the cases but it was still a lot of trouble to dig through them and find what we wanted to watch.  I wanted to rip the DVDs and eventually BluRays but didn't have the storage for them for a long time.  I eventually got an external drive of sufficient size and started ripping movies.  Eventually I found MakeMKV and purchased a license for it. I have been running Plex since 2020 and purchased a lifetime subscription in 2023, so it wasn't a new thing for me to have internally.  

I had been running in on my desktop with an external drive.  I have an Intel NUC that I tried hosting it on for a while, but it wasn't powerful enough to really do it justice.  I often ran into reboot issues due to patching, or I would shut down my machine at the end of the day and have to go and start it back when someone wanted to watch a move.  

Adding the Plex LXC service was super easy using the Proxmox VE Helper-Script to build and install the image.  After adding it, I only needed to mount my external drive and start serving movies.  I had set up 5 of my 6 2G drives as a RAID 0 and moved many of the movies there to increase .  When I lost a drive in the array last week, I replaced 2 of them with very large drives (18G and 22G) and pulled all of my movies onto one of them.  I repurposed the external drive as the large drive on one of my new cluster servers and have it mounted as a target for Proxmox Backup.

I don't have much more to say about running Plex locally, it doesn't require much maintenance.  I added the service to Observium to monitor it and I update the base operating system and run the update of Plex itself through its interface.  As I write this, I am now looking at scripts to automatically update the underlying images. ;-)

I do expose the UI in NextCloud, but we really only use it through our Rokus.  I also picked up a FireStick last month when they were on deep discount at Target.  I hadn't plugged it in until just now, and I haven't finished playing with it yet.  Plex is honestly one of the easiest home applications I am currently running and if you have a CD, DVD, or BluRay collection at home there is no good reason to not take the plunge.

What I am running at home

Since we moved from Brooklyn to Wilmington, I have enough room to start setting up a real home lab.   

Side note: I have had my R710 since 2018 (thank you TechMikeNY) but it hasn't had a real home where I could actually run it as a server for over 3 years. I initially purchased it when Magenic was getting deep into a Pivotal Cloud Foundry partnership so I could run CF locally. I overbought (High-End Dell PowerEdge R710 Server 2x 2.93Ghz X5670 6C 144GB 6x 2TB) but it was something I had been wanting to do for a while and I was able to run it in the Magenic offices in Manhattan. I got a 1/4 rack on wheels and had a great time with it until Magenic closed the office and I had to bring it home to a Manhattan apartment.

I have a 1GB Verizon FiOS connection running in and a semi-finished basement and a full sized room for my office.  With a door!  Anyway, let me do a quick inventory and I will try and come back and talk about each entry in more detail later.  Sharing is caring, and I do want to brag a bit about what I have going on.  

First, I choose Proxmox as my base system.  I know VMWare has ESXi as a free hypervisor and Microsoft still has Hyper-V Server 2019 available, but I wanted open source as well as free with a great UI.  I looked at Unraid as it has perpetual licensing and looks great, but I decided Proxmox VE was a better fit.

Here are the different computers I have running as part of my Proxmox cluster:

• Dell Poweredge R710
• Dell XPS 17 L702X
• Dell Precision M4800
• HP Omen 40L
• Dell Alienware Aurora R5
  

I started out just running on the R710 (The Beast) but thought it would be fun to try clustering and, admittedly, things got a little bit out of hand.  The service that I am currently hosting are:

• OpenMediaVault as my NAS
• Plex as my video server with MakeMKV to rip our DVDs and BluRays
• Calibre-Web to host my many Baen books
• Ollama for local AI
• Open WebUI to talk with Ollama
• Nextcloud as our family hub
• Observium to monitor uptime and status
• Caddy to proxy inbound traffic and handle SSL
• Pi-Hole as my local DNS
• Vaultwarden to manage passwords
• OnlyOffice to edit documents
• AptCacherNg to minimize bandwidth usage when updating my many machines
• Leantime to manage my giant todo list
• GitLab to host my code locally
• Snipe-It to manage assets
• Proxmox Backup Server to keep backups of the above

I have some Windows 11 and openSUSE desktops running in VMs, and use Veeam to backup our desktops to OpenMediaVault.

I have not moved to Ceph storage to allow for VM migrations yet, as it it honestly a bit daunting and I still have a lot of work to do with my standard services.

I will try and get back into blogging more and will dig into the individual pieces as I do.  For example, I have Ollama running locally on my desktop, in a VM with a PCI passthrough, and on The Beast using raw memory and CPU.  The VM and local are memory constrained by the video cards I have but the  raw CPU and memory instance is slow.  

Thanks for your interest!