My most stable/successful network setup yet

Tinkering
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Like most Roon users, my setup has evolved over time. While I’m only a few days into my current setuup/status, it seems to be the most stable/responsive/available setup yet. I’ve worked my way through the following setups:

  • All components and music on a single Windows desktop
  • Separating my music files from Windows desktop and putting them on a NAS
  • Upgrading my network gear to improve NAS performance
  • Splitting the Roon Server component to it’s own 24/7 mini-pc so that ARC would always be available
  • Moving to ROCK instead of Roon Server on the mini-pc
  • Moving ROCK to a virtualized machine on one of my Proxmox nodes

This most recent setup has been ROCK solid (pun intended) and ARC has worked flawlessly. There are 3 proxmox nodes and I have a HA group that I’ve added ROCK to. I haven’t tested a live migration yet, but in theory if one of my proxmox nodes goes down, ROCK should shift seamlessly to another until I have a chance to troubleshoot. Or even if I take a node down for maintenance.

The proxmox nodes are all DIY builds with following significant components:

  • Intel 270k plus cpu’s
  • Dual SFP28 port networking cards
  • 1 TB SSD’s for proxmox OS, but all VM data is kept on the NAS
  • 64 GB memory (by far the most expensive component in a build these days)

I have all Unifi networking gear and the NAS where the music files resides is the Flashtor Pro Gen2.

Anyone else using ROCK on a virtualized machine and getting great results? Setup was a bear, but seems to be worth it so far. Will report back after additional use and testing of HA group migration.

1 Like
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No, I think a container is the way to go, and you have a little more control and metrics.

Yep, I had a quick tinker with ROCK and KVM, and didn’t think it was worth the hassle.

At some point I intend to update my container (Pod) and provide it with a custom bridge network and Tailscale.

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I assume you are reverting back to Roon Server instead of ROCK then? I didn’t think ROCK could be done in a container. What additional control/metrics do you feel you have with Roon Server in a container vs ROCK in a VM?

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Yes, Roon Server running in a lightweight Linux container. ROCK is Roon Server running on a lightweight bespoke Linux (Roon OS) specifically for a specific selection of Intel/ASUS NUC.

With a container I can monitor and manage memory and CPU utilisation, and Roon Server health. It’s also a supported configuration nowadays.

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Supported is nice. But for those that want to run ROCK on anything other than bare metal, I guess we don’t have that yet.

But I can definitely monitor and manage memory, CPU utilization, network usage, disk usage, etc for the ROCK VM. Other than having the ‘supported’ label, I’m curious what additional control/metrics you feel you have?

10

Hi @cpachris,

A very interesting topic, however, as it’s now an unsupported installation and also not really about networking… I’ve moved your topic over to Tinkering

11

Whereas you may see what resources ROCK is using, this may not reflect what is happening with Roon Server.

Since there is a native app for Roon Server, and you are running Linux, I’m uncertain what benefits running Roon OS in a VM brings.