This virtual machine is the engine room of the Trash Panda ecosystem. It is responsible for media discovery, indexing, acquisition, and post-processing automation. While none of these services are internet-facing directly, they are active, chatty, and I/O intensive — which makes proper VM design critical to long-term stability.
This page covers only the VM setup and deployment. Installation and configuration of Prowlarr, Sonarr, Radarr, the torrent client, and other applications are covered in their own guides.
The Automation Services VM:
By isolating these services into a dedicated VM, we:
This VM lives quietly in the background — and when configured correctly, you should rarely need to touch it.
Ubuntu LTS provides:
This VM should run headless and be administered via SSH.
Why 8 GB?
Avoid memory overcommit. Stable automation depends on consistent memory availability.
Automation services are:
Two vCPUs provide sufficient parallelism without wasting host resources.
This storage is used for:
No media is stored here. All downloads, staging, and final media storage should occur on the NAS via the NFS VLAN. NFS mount configuration is assumed to be handled by the builder.
This VM requires two network interfaces, each with a very specific purpose.
Purpose:
Characteristics:
This is the VM’s control plane.
Purpose:
Characteristics:
Segregating file I/O from control traffic ensures:
Assuming VMware Workstation Pro 17:
Do not bridge both NICs to the same network.
Automation services:
Placing this VM outside the DMZ:
If indexers or trackers are unreachable without a VPN, that concern should be addressed at the network or firewall layer, not by exposing this VM.
This VM is designed to be:
If it ever breaks, you should be able to:
1. Recreate the VM
2. Restore configuration
3. Resume automation
No irreplaceable data should live here.
Once the VM is deployed and reachable:
Each of these topics is covered in their respective guides.
If this VM feels boring once it’s running — that means it’s doing its job.