currently I have the PMS running under Ubuntu 18.04 server (x64) as a VM on a Dell PowerEdge R720 w/2x E5-2690 CPU’s and 128GB running a RAID10 of 500GB SSD’s… my Plex media lives on a Synology DS418 and is replicated to another NAS of the same type as a backup. The PMS has 6 vcores assigned to it (6 cores 1 socket)
I have come into a HP DL320e G8 w/an E3-1220v2 CPU and 4x4TB HD’s … was thinking about just going physical on the Plex server instead of a VM but not sure if the tradeoff of physical to lower CPU would be better.
As with most questions of this nature, it depends on your use case. VM’s have limited hardware support so if for example you wanted to put a video capture card in there and attach to antenna for live TV you would not be able to do that in a VM. It also depends on what kind of usage you get. Do you do a lot of transcoding to support different devices or are you mostly direct play? The former requires for CPU and RAM. The DL320 is not a bad box and would support all potential use cases, especially if you stick with Ubuntu.
really, only the OP is going to be able to answer the question, by simply setting up a test server on the HP (does not have to be your full library), and see what kind of load it takes based on your current users/usage.
If the HP performs within your satisfaction and you have your own reasons to migrate to it, by all means.
If not, then you are all set where it is (unless there are some kind of problems or other reasons you want to move it off your current server, that haven’t been explained).
You could add more virtual cores if needed, and worst case you could start looking for a suitable gpu that would fit in the 720, if you are looking for improving transcode performance.
I was just thinking performance for streaming – transcoding – I dont seem to have major issues but there are times with 3-4 streams going at once it seems to choke a little
It all depends on the overhead of the underlying system. If your base OS only uses negliable resources, the performance in your VM shouldn’t be far from bare metal. I don’t know about your setup, but you should be able to answers that question yourself.
