Virtual Machine requirements/recommendations for PMS

General Discussions
1

Hello,

I currently deploy Plex Media Server (PMS) as a Docker container on a Virtual Machine with Proxmox VE as the Hypervisor (KVM). The Node has 2 virtual cores and 2GB of memory.

I notice performance issues – especially with Live TV and Recordings from my HDHomeRun Quatro.

I do notice significant high CPU utilization on the running container with my Prometheus+Grafana monitoring.

My question is:

What is the minimum and recommended requirements for running Plex Media Serve r (PMS) in a virtual environment to get acceptable to decent performance.

Thanks!

cheers
James

2

The defining factor will be, do you have clients that can play MPEG2 streams, if not then the CPU and/or GPU will have to transcode for you. If you have a recent core Ix-xxxx cpu, it might perform better with a LXC install. Plex likes high single core performance for live tv, find out your passmark, for a 20Mbps 1080 stream you would need close to 3000. DVR shouldn’t use that much, make sure you are using VIRTIO for network and disk.