Hey all, my friends have started more readily using my plex server so i wanted to beef it up a bit. Also as a side project thats fun for me i plan to watercool the server (a hobby of mine)
It is actually running on a spare desktop of mine at the moment that consists of a AMD Ryzen 5 1600 & 16GB DDR4 but i was looking to move to a bigger platform as the Ryzen cant handle as many transcodes as i would like and still act as a server. I run unRaid as the virtualization base for my server and then Plex runs in a VM (I have several other VM’s as well)
Current ‘server’ Hardware:
Asus Z9PE-D8 WS
2x Xeon E5-2670 (v1s)
32GB (8x 4GB DDR 3 1333 ECC)
5x WD RED 8TB
1x Toshiba X300 5TB (scratch drive outside of the unraid array)
2x Samsung 850 EVO 250GB (for the VM’s)
Hardware to buy:
2x Xeon E5-2680V2 (Fastest reasonably priced cpus i can put in this board, once i build it, i want to run it till it dies)
Replace the 32GB with 64GB (and maybe bump up to 1600)
Leaning towards Caselabs for the case, Maybe the Mercury S8 or something bigger. Ideally want to be able to fit ~8 3.5" drives (and a couple 2.5")
All the watercooling gear (what i get will largely depend on the case i get)
A couple SAS cards (non-raid) - Want to get some so i can run SAS to SATA breakout cables, and the onboard Intel SATA ports no longer work on my Asus board
Want to be able to handle roughly 10 1080p streams at the same time but still have some power left over for my other VM’s
Curious what other folks have done for really big plex servers
10- 1080p streams (transcoded) would need a passmark of approximtely 20000.
If the streams are not being transcoded, surely you would run out of network bandwidth before processing power.
Beauty of network bandwidth is, a lot of new motherboards are coming out with 10 Gigabit integrated NIC’s. And Add in 10 Gigabit NIC’s are on the cheap.
I was about to pick up a Buffalo Brand 10 Gigabit 8 port switch for pretty cheap (cheap as far as 10 Gigabit switches go). I’m still hosting plex on my main gaming PC, but plans to build possibly a threadripper set up for plex… At this rate I’m going to run out of CPU processing power before network bandwidth haha.
Networking isn’t a problem. A machine should be able to easily handle 10 full direct play blu ray (even 4K) files at the same time.
You will get a bump in Passmark score overall from 13,238 to 21,677. Put another way your current machine CPU wise will have about 2/3rd the CPU the new machine will have. So roughly speaking you will get about 1/3rd more transcodes then you presently do assuming everything scales evenly.
Before going down this route, do you have a Nvidia or AMD video card you could test HW transcoding with first on your current machine? You might find it far easier to go with a GPU upgrade over CPUs which will be easier, cost less in electrical use and probably be much more powerful overall.
@SiscoPlex said:
10- 1080p streams (transcoded) would need a passmark of approximtely 20000.
If the streams are not being transcoded, surely you would run out of network bandwidth before processing power.
I have a symmetrical 1gb connection so that isnt an issue
@cayars said:
Networking isn’t a problem. A machine should be able to easily handle 10 full direct play blu ray (even 4K) files at the same time.
You will get a bump in Passmark score overall from 13,238 to 21,677. Put another way your current machine CPU wise will have about 2/3rd the CPU the new machine will have. So roughly speaking you will get about 1/3rd more transcodes then you presently do assuming everything scales evenly.
Before going down this route, do you have a Nvidia or AMD video card you could test HW transcoding with first on your current machine? You might find it far easier to go with a GPU upgrade over CPUs which will be easier, cost less in electrical use and probably be much more powerful overall.
Carlo
I dont have a spare gpu but depending how well that works it may be easier to add a gpu to my current machine rather than going back to the dual Xeon setup. Not really familiar with gpu transcoding with plex though
Got a friend selling some medium sized dell servers.
Is it possible it have multiple servers on the same network and distribute the workload among them? (would be cool to have multiple small servers and split the load among them, would also increase redundancy in case one ever went down) or would i have to dedicate each one to a different library?
Also just to be clear, i realize most of this is overkill but this stuff is a hobby if mine and i enjoy it.
I noticed you said you don’t have a “spare” GPU. Do you have one you could pull for a few hours of testing?
Do you have any other computers in the house with a recent i5/i7 with QuickSync you could use for a test?
You could always setup a new Plex server on either of them with one test library and a few test files. Nothing fancy, but just enough to test transcoding on.
You mentioned your goal was 10 transcodes but never mentioned how many transcodes your current system can handle. Do yu know your current number?
If you wouldn’t mind, why do you need to support so many transcodes at one time? What is it about your files/setup that won’t direct play the files that requires transcoding?
Yes, it is possible to run multiple servers. The newer clients featuring TV2 UI such as xbox and PMP2 more or less hide the server. They are based on type first vs the current gen of clients that focus server/library. The new style clients hide where the content is coming from (sort of) and would allow you to serve up movies from server1 and TV Shows from Server2 and DVR recordings/Live TV from Server3 for instance. That may or may not help depending on what your users play. If they all play just movies or tv shows it won’t help but if half the users are playing movies and half are playing shows then it does help.
But keep in mind it will be quite a while before all clients are ported over to this new UI.
@cayars said:
I noticed you said you don’t have a “spare” GPU. Do you have one you could pull for a few hours of testing?
Do you have any other computers in the house with a recent i5/i7 with QuickSync you could use for a test?
You could always setup a new Plex server on either of them with one test library and a few test files. Nothing fancy, but just enough to test transcoding on.
You mentioned your goal was 10 transcodes but never mentioned how many transcodes your current system can handle. Do yu know your current number?
If you wouldn’t mind, why do you need to support so many transcodes at one time? What is it about your files/setup that won’t direct play the files that requires transcoding?
Yes, it is possible to run multiple servers. The newer clients featuring TV2 UI such as xbox and PMP2 more or less hide the server. They are based on type first vs the current gen of clients that focus server/library. The new style clients hide where the content is coming from (sort of) and would allow you to serve up movies from server1 and TV Shows from Server2 and DVR recordings/Live TV from Server3 for instance. That may or may not help depending on what your users play. If they all play just movies or tv shows it won’t help but if half the users are playing movies and half are playing shows then it does help.
But keep in mind it will be quite a while before all clients are ported over to this new UI.
I dont have a gpu kicking around, the only gaming gpu i have at the moment a GTX 1070 is in my laptop lol. What i meant by that is if gpu transcoding was really good then i would be willing to go buy a gpu for it instead of more servers.
Looking at my plex logs id guess i can support about 6 people right now. I gave quite a few of my friends/family access to the server so there about 20 people total that have access to it (that will probably increase to about 30) and its pretty much every client you can possibly imagine (although web browsers, PS4/3 and roku seems to be the most common).
Yeah movies are the most of what folks play and they generally are the most demanding. Is there no way to setup multiple servers, have them have access to all of the content and load balance between them? Rather than having to divide the library up among multiple servers?
@Blindsay said:
Is there no way to setup multiple servers, have them have access to all of the content and load balance between them? Rather than having to divide the library up among multiple servers?
This is currently not possible under current Plex architecture.
@Blindsay said:
Is there no way to setup multiple servers, have them have access to all of the content and load balance between them? Rather than having to divide the library up among multiple servers?
This is currently not possible under current Plex architecture.
hmm, there wouldnt be anyway to have multiple servers with the same name and then setup a load balance of some sort to route them to the different servers (via my internal IP) as the requests come in through my router?
Not easily no. Then you would also run into watch status issues where they are different between the servers. Far easier to just segment the users and of course help the users to setup their environment to direct stream if at all possible so you don’t have to transcode when it’s not really needed.
Speaking of hardware, how important is the speed of the drive that Plex is actually on (where all of the thumnails and artwork etc. Is stored). Is there any benefit to keeping it on faster storage? Was thinking of getting an Intel optane drive for it, right now it’s on a normal 2.5" sata SSD but the optane drives have significantly faster random read/write speeds.
You could run a IP load balancer to switch the incoming users between the servers. The F5 does this in the enterprise world but I believe there is an open source product.
Which GPUs are the best to use at a reasonable price? I am using a Old HP class server for my Plex that I bought off a customer for $200. I had some SAS SSDs and 7ks drives from a SAN that came off of lease for a customer that did not want them. The dual CPUs are a little slow at times so a GPU might be a great solution for me.
Unless you aren’t worried about watched status I wouldn’t do a load balancer as it might make things harder. Easiest for now to just assign users to multiple servers if needed and adjust over time as needed.
Thinking about ditching my old server hardware and just building something new. Was checking out the AMD Threadripper 1950X but im thinking the Intel Core i9-7900X might be better due to its higher single thread rating?
