I have a similar setup, 3x Ubuntu 18.04 VM’s on ESXi 6.7. I had a lot of trouble trying to get consistent performance out of a USB tuner on pass-thru to a VM and in the end bought a pci-e card to do the job. The problem is that ESXi USB support is limited - and doesn’t really support the realtime nature required for the streaming. For me, despite months of troubleshooting and re-configuring, it would either fail or timeout on start or work for a while then fail.
You can most definitely pass-through a PCI-E card on the host to any ESXi VM, but just like USB, exclusively to one VM.
One way to get around the sharing of a tuner is to use another VM running TVheadend. It’s not a simple solution, but you can attach the tuner to TVH then using tvhproxy, it can be shared to multiple Plex servers (provided that the tuner requested is not already busy).
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