Community feedback on Virtualization and PMS

General Discussions
1

Hello,

I am in the process of building a new PMS and I wanted to get some thoughts and opinions from the community as to the best configuration for it.

As it stands I have my old i7 - 980x overclocked to 4.7 ghz in an Asus Rampage III with 24gb of ram and a 240gb ssd for the OS. All my media is on my 16 bay QNAP which is my current under powered PMS.

I have not decided on an decided on an OS for the system yet as I am wanting to do some virtualization to handle some other application I am running. With my decision to do virtualization I have been presented with several options of what I could do. I could setup an UNRAID server as I am thinking about replacing the QNAP eventually with something better. If I go with UNRAID I could install PMS with Docker or I could spin up a VM and install PMS on Windows or Linux. I could also not use UNRAID and go with Linux or windows with a hyper-visor and spin up a VM and run PMS on the VM. I could also go full on and install ESXI and go down the VM route.

For the most part the usage of PMS is a max of 3-4 users streaming with 2-3 needing transcoding. The key things I am looking for is a suggestion on what resources to give PMS so that PMS has the horse power to run as it does not now on the little i3 in the QNAP while not hogging all the resources. I would also like to have it so I can automate the PMS upgrades as much as possible. And finally what other people have experienced with similar setups doing virtualization and running PMS.

Thanks

2

Let me rephrase this a little. I think I am going to go down the unRAID route for the server. So should I stick to having PMS on full version linux/windows or is Docker a better bet?

3

I have mine on a Virtual Machine with 24 GB of ram.

4

I run ESX with 2vCPU and 3GB ram on Windows 10 PMS server. I prepare my media to avoid most transcoding. I typically only support internal clients, nothing outside of my immediate family. Transcoding is typically limited to audio whenever needed. It sits idle most of the time, even when playing since most things direct play.

5

@drinehart said:
I run ESX with 2vCPU and 3GB ram on Windows 10 PMS server. I prepare my media to avoid most transcoding. I typically only support internal clients, nothing outside of my immediate family. Transcoding is typically limited to audio whenever needed. It sits idle most of the time, even when playing since most things direct play.

What to you have for media players and for prepping the media? Most of my media gets transcoded due to .ASS subs and or DTS audio and the fact that it is being played on a roku which seems to struggle a lot with almost everything I try to watch.

6

@zaraki1311 -

Primarily:
mkv/h264. 1 audio AAC 2 channel, 2 audio DTS/AC3/whatever, subs are only forced subs and SRT format in the mkv. I don’t use subs a lot, but if I did, I would try to burn them directly into the video whenever I could to avoid it. Roku would not need or be able to see that they are there. I have thought about incorporating that step into my process when I rip, but I have not needed to yet.

Clients are primarily Roku 2 2015 models, one hooked up to AVR, others hooked straight to TV via HDMI with only TV speakers.

The CPU in the host machine is a Xeon E3-1225v3.

7

hmmm, I am not sure what my best option is. I have a mix of media that gets loaded. I would say 70-80% is H264 at 2065kbps and AAC Stereo at 252kbps with .ASS subs and there are about 5-10 25min files a day. The rest of the media is a jumbled mess of different audio and video settings.

So Basically I could either put more horsepower into PMS so it can transcode all this when needed or I put the horsepower into a VM to reencode all the media coming in to try to standardize what I can.

8

@drinehart said:
I run ESX with 2vCPU and 3GB ram on Windows 10 PMS server. I prepare my media to avoid most transcoding. I typically only support internal clients, nothing outside of my immediate family. Transcoding is typically limited to audio whenever needed. It sits idle most of the time, even when playing since most things direct play.

I have my setup configured similar to this and it’s never caused me any issue… My guiding premise is to DirectPlay/Stream as much as possible in the house on a day-to-day basis while still being able to transcode for house guests, while I travel, in-home phones/tablets and a few remote clients who watch a couple shows/movies a night.

Media

  • Movies: Mostly full Bluray remuxes. 1080p encodes for movies I like less or “talkers” that wouldn’t really benefit from a remux.
  • TV: 720p encodes with a few Bluray remuxes for some specific series.

Clients

  • All main TVs (3) in my house are wired and running PMP on machines which either have the CPU power or hw acceleration ability to DirectPlay/Stream nearly every file I have. These are a combination of rPi3s, Intel NUCs, Zotac miniPCs, etc.
  • Secondary TVs (2) have the newer AC Chromecast plugged in. These TVs are in our guest room and another spare room we do not often use.
  • Friends have varying combinations of phones, tablets, Rokus, XboxONE, Chromecast. No issues reported with any of them. A couple of them have sufficient download capacity that they are able to Direct Play (or Direct Stream) all but the remuxes.
  • I also have a Passport Wireless for plane/car trips which I am constantly optimizing my latest files for as they are loaded into Plex.

PMS/Network/MediaStorage

  • I have PMS running on an Ubuntu 16.04 VM (hosted on top of i7-3770 CPU). 4vCPU, 2GB RAM.
  • Gigabit network throughout the house.
  • All Plex media is stored on a physical unRAID machine (Celeron CPU, 4GB RAM used only as file server… no plugins/VMs/etc)
  • Gigabit WAN for remote streamers. When they laid fiber in my neighborhood, my transcode necessity dropped significantly.