Hi there,
I am looking to set up an Openhab 2 server. I am also looking for a Plex server at the same time. My thought is that I was looking at an HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 G1610T 1P 4GB-U B120i as you can get them on eBay now for around the £200 range. I was then going to use FreeNAS as the main software.
The question I am asking does anyone have any knowledge if this will be powerful enough for both servers (with only the 2 core version) and also any information about setting Openhab 2 up in a docker. I had a quick look around but didn’t find much. Thanks
It will certainly be powerful enough for OH since many people run it on raspberry pi’s.
You will probably have better luck asking about Plex on their forums. I run an Emby (similar to Plex) virtual machine that is allocated a single core of my Xeon E3 1220 v3 and it does fine. Most of my content is SD though. How much power you need is going to depend on what kind of content, are you transcoding, etc. It’s a bit like asking how far is New York without knowing where you’re starting from.
That should be powerful enough to run both. I run Plex along with some other servers on a similarly speced VM on my server and I used to run both Plex and OH together on an old laptop mostly fine for a year or two before that (sometimes memory would get low and Plex would have problems transcoding on the fly on the old laptop). And you can have Plex create pre-transcoded versions of your videos so it doesn’t have to transcode on the fly if it is a problem.
One problem you will run into is that both Plex and OH use port 5000 for UPnP so you will have to negotiate that somehow (i.e. only one will be able to have UPnP support if they are on the same host).
You might consider using a Type-1 Hypervisor like ESXi or Zen instead of FreeNAS as your base OS and then create two or three VMs to host your NAS, Plex, and OH separately.
tl;dr: It works well. You have to use --net=HOST for UPnP support. You have to run as root for certain features of the Network binding and for the Dash Button binding to work. The Exec binding isn’t going to be much use to you. Upgrading isn’t as straight forward as it should be but we are working on fixing that.
Docker isn’t a bad choice if you don’t want to mess with VMs. Despite having everything in VMs, I still run each service in its own Docker container. It makes management, migration, backup, upgrade, and cohosting sooo much easier.
