Server Version#: 1.13.8.5395
Dell PowerEdge T30 with 32GB RAM, Intel Xeon E3-1225 v5 CPU 3.30Ghz
Baremetal OS: ESXi 6.7 running Windows Server 2016 as guest OS
512GB SSD for ESXi and VMs
2x 8TB 7200RPM SATA HDDs for Plex media
I used to have an old Optiplex 7010 with i7 CPU and 8GB RAM running a similar setup as listed above with ESXi and Windows Server and I used to get about 5 simultaneous HD transcodes H264. Now with updated hardware and a PowerEdge T30 I get no more than 3 H264transcodes. Shouldn’t I get more transcodes? I can’t even get a single H265 transcode reliably. It buffers and maxes out the CPU. Any ideas?
@SlothTechTV I saw your Youtube video recommending the PowerEdge T30 and since I have one of those, I thought you may be able to help. Thanks!
did you enable hardware transcoding? By my math if you enable hardware transcoding and quicksync is working right you should easily get double those numbers… maybe even more. when you go to your who’s watching in plex do you see hw > hw or is it all software transcoding?
those numbers are accurate for software transcoding; however, i think hes referring to hardware transcoding which that iGPU + cpu combination should net him quite a bit more than that.
I’ve been dealing with this issue for some months now, and I just decided to ask now. So there is some history behind this that I am just beginning to remember. I have HW transcoding enabled but Plex never used it unless I set the GPU to passthrough in ESXi. I recall doing this once and after a few hours of use I got a PSOD (Purple Screen of Death) and I had to do a recovery of my ESXi to get it back to boot up. So I have disabled passthrough for the P530 GPU since then and I am afraid to turn it on again. Now, after that, I installed an NVIDIA GT710 card which I may at some point pass through to see how that works. But it does seem to me that my old 3rd generation Intel i7 CPU on the Optiplex was much more powerful than this one. I didn’t have a GPU on the optiplex and didn’t need HW transcoding and got more transcodes than I do now.
Hardware-Acceleration Streaming is not currently possible inside of virtual machines, as virtual machine hosts do not expose low-level video hardware to the guest operating system. While some virtual machines expose generic 3D acceleration to the guest OS as a virtual driver, this does not include support for accelerated video decoding or encoding.
So just comparing software transcoding, 3 is still right. Do you know exactly what CPU you had in the Optiplex. Looking at their options now, they offer on the lower end models a i7-7700. That has a score of 12,000. If your old i7 had a similar processor, then you could have gotten 5 before. So just getting a newer system does not guarantee better performance if you went from the higher end of an older system to the lower end of a new system.
I have a 5-year old laptop that I got the top of the line CPU at the time with a score of >8000. My newest, cheap desktop computer barely goes over 9000. So newer isn’t always better.
Thank you so much @anon18523487. That was very informative. On the old Optiplex I had a third generation i7 CPU, specifically i7 3770. Are you saying that that CPU is more powerful than a Xeon E3 1225 V5?
I’ve been contemplating how I am going to get this whole system from virtual to physical. The whole reason for me running as a VM is because I have another VM running on it that I use for testing. Perhaps I can install the Windows Server 2016 baremetal and run Hyper-V for my test VM inside 2016. I have plenty of RAM for that setup. Now, that would be a daunting task, so before I commit to it, I would like to make sure it is worth it. I don’t want to convert the whole thing, and then find out I only get a couple extra transcodes than I do now.
Read my earlier post. I didn’t get better transcoding performance when I enabled HW acceleration. What I did get was a Purple Screen of Death and ESXi wouldn’t boot anymore.
Yes, I guess that’s the only thing I can do: make it physical rather than virtual. But thanks for the link comparing the CPUs. That explains why the i7 has better performance even when virtualized.
Thank you. I will read through that. I have the full blown Windows 2016 server, not the text-only version. So I can install Plex there natively on the hardware and then use Hyper-V to run my other VM (which is not for Plex). I am not a fan of VirtualBox. It doesn’t run as a service so that is a major limitation.
Although I like ESXi better than HyperV sometimes you gotta byte the bullet.
Yes, when you install Hyper-V on the server essentially everything that was native now runs in a master hyper-V session. It has to hook the hardware for proper support so the way it does this is by putting your default desktop in this session.
Try Plex without Hyper-V installed and note your performance (how many transcodes) then install Hyper-V and test again. You might be fine but it’s best to test in stages so you know exactly how much changes performance wise and know why.
Except that is not what I was planning to do. The reason I mentioned HyperV is because I want to run a separate Windows installation to hold other programs for other reasons. It has nothing to do with Plex. The host will be the one running Plex, not the guest. Sorry for the confusion.
Gotcha… I know it can take a performance hit. But I have plenty of RAM to pull at least 8GB for the guest VM, and the VM won’t be using much CPU power. It will be mostly idle and will do some I/O over the network. Nothing major. In fact, the VM won’t be running all the time. As you know, HyperV, just like ESX, can manage and prioritize system resources according to the configuration you specify. I also have space constraints so I can’t setup another physical box for that purpose. In addition, a VM can easily be powered on/off on demand.
