Hey,
I currently run Plex on an Intel NUC with Debian 8 as the OS. The NUC literally does nothing else but run PMS (all the videos/music/etc… are accessed over NFS to a Synology NAS, even the cache files are kept over NFS too I think).
I chose this particular NUC as it has Iris 540 graphics which I was told at the time would be particularly useful for transcoding, but at some point I need to reinstall it and I wanted to look at the possibilities of either running PMS inside a VM or container. This isn’t because I’d want to run another VM/container alongside on the same hardware though - I’d be looking to do this only because it’d be easier maintenance really.
To be honest I may get the kind of ease of management if this thing had an out-of-band management interface or just booting the OS over the network instead of from the in built SSD. But that’s a thought for another time…
Does anyone currently run PMS in a VM or container… where… they’ve explicitly made sure (and tested) that PMS is taking advantage of the hosts GPU capabilities? and if so… what tech did you use (e.g. hyperv/kvm/vmware/lxc/docker/etc) and what extra config did you use to achieve that properly?
Personally I use Proxmox VE myself (which is LXC and KVM) but I’m very clued up on VMware too as I have to use it at work.
I have noticed this can be done with the official Plex Docker image, see random reddit post here… https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/749hnc/hardware_transcoding_with_plex_docker/
But I do recall (maybe incorrectly as I can’t see how this would be possible) that a couple of years back the guys in #plex on freenode were talking about running a real VM on these kinds of NUC’s (I’m pretty sure that was either KVM or VMware) and the guests still somehow having access to the hosts GPU… but without PCI-E pass-through of the GPU. Maybe there was some special way of doing this considering it’s an integrated GPU (the Iris 540 is part of my Intel i5 processor) rather than a discrete GPU? Not sure, but if this rings a bell - let me know.
Any thoughts?
