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.
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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…
Hello,
I’m running my roon server on a debian proxmox vm.
as nas, I use xigmanas (proxmox vm) with ZFS with raid-z1 pool of 4x4TB disks.
It runs since 5 years without any problem.
I can really recommend proxmox as plattform.
Lots of options. I use two unprivileged containers for roon and samba and pass through the zfs dataset with the music files to roon. You cannot mount the cifs share in the roon container, however, but in your case (with samba on a vm) you could mount the share on the proxmox host and pass through the mount point.
I’ve been using Roon with docker with the container at GitHub - mackid1993/docker-roonserver provided by @mackid1993 in Unraid.
At home its always been solid. I use Arc over Tailscale and I’d say perhaps a year ago there’d be the occasional crash of the iPhone app randomly, but havent had any of that in a number of months - absolutely stable.
Just thought I’d mention for those that might be interested to self host in docker but might have been put off by forum docker comments and are slightly too nervous to dive right into Proxmox..
Unraid does cost of course, but if you’re already forking out for Roon..
Hi all — thought I’d share how switching to Proxmox (and running ROCK in a VM) rescued my little setup.
I was running Roon Core on a cheap MiniPC (NiPoGi E3B, Ryzen 5 7430U, 32 GB DDR4, 512 GB SSD) under Windows 11 and it worked fine until I upgraded my DAC to a Topping DX5 II and started pushing upsampling and DSD/DSF files. My library (~109k tracks) lives on an ASUS NAS, and the MiniPC quickly hit its limits: CPU load creeping up (around ×1.2) and multiroom playback getting flaky.
So I bit the bullet, nuked Windows, tweaked the BIOS and installed Proxmox. With help from my friend Gemini I created a VM for ROCK and gave it 16 GB RAM. Result: rock‑solid stability and a huge performance jump — lowest processing speed is now about ×3.2 and everything runs smoothly, including multiroom and heavy upsampling.
Bottom line: Proxmox is an easy, effective way to run ROCK, especially if you’re not on an Intel NUC. Highly recommended for squeezing more life out of modest hardware.
Enjoy the music,
Oli
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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.)
15
Good to see you have things working now. 100,000 tracks is the limit of the lower powered NUCs, but you would probably have found that Roon OS on that hardware would also run far better that Windows, which does not make efficient use of hardware.
That said, I have found a container a far better approach, too. I use an unprivileged container with Podman (host Ubuntu 24.04.3.)
I recommended making proxmox restarting the vm daily, just to clear up the memory leak which may occur. I am running mostly 24/7 (make a force restart at 4am) on 4 core and 8gb ram setup on proxmox, it start reaching at 7gb ram usage after 22 hr.
Good idea! Will do, thanks.
The plan, is rather soon than later, to buy a MacMini M4, that ought to accomodate that ever growing library. That is if the Clawdbot fanatics don’t buy them all.
Cheers,
Oli
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.)
18
I’ve been monitoring Roon server for some months using Grafana, and it looks like the leak was resolved.
I agree. @mjw and I run the same Glances → Influx ← Grafana stack. There was a pretty significant memory leak that stuck around for a while but was fixed months back and hasn’t regressed.
