While my setup is a little different than yours (Windows and FreeBSD based PMS servers and a very old version of FreeNAS (pre iX Systems)), I might be able to help relieve you of some of your concerns…
In my setup, I only have my media files mounted via NFS as read only on my FreeBSD server which is our primary server for streaming and prefer to let the Windows server to do Live TV/DVR duties, any encoding work I do myself with Handbrake, as well as any file management… All my media is encoded to Direct Play to our primary devices, three older Rokus… I don’t share my PLEX with any friends, so the only remote streaming is when the family travels…
When I first started on my path to running two servers it was a Windows server and the FreeNAS box… I was able to use my Windows server’s database after doing some editing, mainly changing the location of my media from mapped drives to UNC path names using this thread, Plex database modification - Moving data the right/wrong way. I still had to re-match a few things but all in all I believe going this route was quicker than re-downloading all the metadata and still having to fix the same files that didn’t match before…
We have never had a problem with multiple streaming the same movie, show, or song at the same time with Direct Play… I have no idea if it works if one of those streams needed transcoding but as long as the server is powerful enough, I see no reason why it wouldn’t…
I few other cavets I can mention is make sure your servers have differnet names… Also, the servers need to use different ports on your router, another words in my setup I use 32410 on the my gateway/router to go to 32400 on one server and 32420 on my gateway/router go to 32400 on the second server… And lastly, permissions are everything!!! Ninety percent of all problems on Linux/Unix are permission related…
I hope this helps you some and with any luck maybe @ChuckPa will chime in, he seems to be the resident Linux guru here and can give you a bit of knowledge and advice…
Good luck!!!
