never thought I’d be anywhere near being able to write this, but Roon has been rock solid (stability & performance) for me for 18 months, and I think it’s in part because I’ve now deployed it in a Ubuntu VM on Proxmox. The amount of resources it has is tiny compared to anything else I’ve ever run it on (ROCK on NUCs of generations 7,8,10; MOCK on GMKtec N97 and N150 & HP Elitedesk G4 mini). Now I have it running on a 2-core, 16gb memory VM (on a beefy EPYC 7713 / Supermicro H12ssl-I / 512gb 2966MHz ecc ddr4 build) with TrueNAS also virtualized on same machine with 80tb usable of raidz2. And it’s been so solid & performant. My HQPlayer is on my Mac Mini M4 daily driver in the background. It just keeps ticking - and I can see in pulse the 1-2 times it’s gotten stuck, and then instead of restoring a Roon backup, if I can’t fix I can just roll back with proxmox backup server.
Proxmox is not for the technophobic. But virtualization is easier than I thought for a truly non-tech person, and it’s got so many benefits.
Good to read that, as I am looking to do something similar at some point in the future.
Have you tried running it in a ProxMox container as well, as I have read some good things about that we well.
A few people I know will only consider running Roon in a Docker container or similar as they are convinced it runs more constrained and better in this kind of environment. Not yet tried it myself but looking forward to it at some point.
mjw
(Here I am with a brain the size of a planet and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper. Call that job satisfaction? I don't.)
3
I decided against Promox about a year ago after experimenting with various options, and went for a light install of Ubuntu 24.04 Server. On this I run KVM / Qemu for Windows 10 (with GPU passthrough for gaming), and an Ubuntu desktop VM.
Roon and other services run in Podman containers. Roon is very stable, as is everything else.
Cockpit and ssh provide remote access. I use Veeam for bare metal restore, and Borg for local and cloud backup of my data.
After over a decade of using ZFS mirrors (best for redundancy) I now use a mix of spinning and SSD on LVM.
In truth I don’t think there is a massive difference between what we are talking about. If you run ProxMox as a container inside a minimum Ubuntu build.
It’s good to be able to try various options and see what works best and gives the highest reliability.
The argument for running proxmox for me is that the backup / snapshot infrastructure makes it so easy for me to experiment, make mistakes, roll back. I screw up, blow away my container/vm, and roll back multiple times a week. I learn so much faster with good brakes than I ever did with one where I had to have good habits and do everything via the cli. If I’d truly grown up in tech, it’d be a way different story for me - but I came to this late. So proxmox has some overhead, but it is incredibly “consumer friendly” to do things like set up a cluster, migrate guests between nodes for maintenance, make snapshots. If you come from this world I get it, it’s kind of resource heavy for features you can do yourself. But if you know less about what you’re doing, it makes everything so much simpler - and so you act differently. I’ve probably got overbuilt hardware at this point, so I don’t even notice the overhead. Spin up a few new VMs with some real resources to experiment with ollama & llms locally? No problem. Save em to my pbs and blow em away? Yep. Never thought I’d be capable of this stuff.
mjw
(Here I am with a brain the size of a planet and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper. Call that job satisfaction? I don't.)
6
I get the benefits, and I’m certainly not knocking it. For my use case, I decided to go with what I know, and learn about KVM and containers. The core OS is just about static nowadays, and I can run snapshots on KVM and LVM.
But I’d agree that running Roon server in a virtual environment is the ideal solution. I chose to prepare a custom Podman image based on Ubuntu, and it runs without issue, and I can see exactly what’s going on with CPU and memory.
I just wanted to drop my two cents, I have the same experience now for over a year.
I had roon in a Ubuntu Server VM on my TrueNAS and I was never happy with it.
Since last year, Roon is running on ProxMox as a RoonROCK Installation and I never touched it since.
Solid since day one, stable VPN connection from my office to my Core, ARC is working (more or less) flawless…