Thinking of migrating to Ubuntu, physical or virtual?

[RedBaron164 18]

I've been running Emby on a Server 2012 R2 VM now for several years. The VM has 8-cores and 4gb's of ram which, for my 15+TB of media and at most 2 simultaneous users, has been working great. That said I've moved many of my in-home servers over to Ubuntu over the past couple of years and I've been thinking about doing the same with Emby for awhile. I recently acquired an old Dell R720xd from work which has 128gb of ram and Dual Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2 CPU's with a total of 16 physical cores, (32 with hyper-threading) and enough storage where I can have 3TB in a Raid10 or a little over 5TB in a Raid5. Just to be clear, my Media is stored on separate server, only TV recordings are stored locally on the Emby server itself.

So here in lies my dilemma, do I go physical and give Emby the full resources of the hardware, or go virtual so I can have multiple VM's on this box?

I would be using Hyper-V and my main concern at this point is how well hardware acceleration for transcoding is going to work. My current line of thought is, hardware accelerated transcoding will probably work best if I just install Ubuntu on the bare server and let Emby have everything. But I'm not sure how well hardware acceleration is going to work on this server hardware with Ubuntu. And if hardware acceleration won't work well, or at all, I might as well utilize the hardware has a host and keep Emby as a VM.

I'm hoping some of you fine people will be able to give me some guidance on this matter so I don't waste time building it one way and find out it's not going to work as I had hoped.

Edited October 19, 2018 by RedBaron164

[mastrmind11 717]

I've been running Emby on a Server 2012 R2 VM now for several years. The VM has 8-cores and 4gb's of ram which, for my 15+TB of media and at most 2 simultaneous users, has been working great. That said I've moved many of my in-home servers over to Ubuntu over the past couple of years and I've been thinking about doing the same with Emby for awhile. I recently acquired an old Dell R720xd from work which has 128gb of ram and Dual Intel Xeon E5-2650 v2 CPU's with a total of 16 physical cores, (32 with hyper-threading) and enough storage where I can have 3TB in a Raid10 or a little over 5TB in a Raid5. Just to be clear, my Media is stored on separate server, only TV recordings are stored locally on the Emby server itself.

 

So here in lies my dilemma, do I go physical and give Emby the full resources of the hardware, or go virtual so I can have multiple VM's on this box?

 

I would be using Hyper-V and my main concern at this point is how well hardware acceleration for transcoding is going to work. My current line of thought is, hardware accelerated transcoding will probably work best if I just install Ubuntu on the bare server and let Emby have everything. But I'm not sure how well hardware acceleration is going to work on this server hardware with Ubuntu. And if hardware acceleration won't work well, or at all, I might as well utilize the hardware has a host and keep Emby as a VM.

 

I'm hoping some of you fine people will be able to give me some guidance on this matter so I don't waste time building it one way and find out it's not going to work as I had hoped.

Why would you need hadrware acceleration for 2 simultaneous users?  Those specs are beefy enough for like 20 without it.  IMO because the box is such a beast, go the VM route and allocate as many cores as suit your transcoding needs.

 

btw, nice acquisition

[RedBaron164 18]

Thanks,

I've been thinking about giving more friends/family access to the system which currently my system can't handle. And since a lot of my content is in x265 if they want to watch stuff it will need to transcode. Where as the majority of the Emby clients I have in my house can play x265 natively, and with the new FireTV stick going 4k soon all of my Emby clients will play x265 natively. I just don't want to have to worry about someone watching a movie and the transcode process sucking up valuable resources that are needed for myself or a show that it's currently recording etc.

I'm also concerned about overall performance. As in, even with 15k SAS drives, would Emby's DB run better without a virtual disk layer slowing it down. On my current Emby VM I had to move the DB to a VHD on an SSD to boost performance because the local Raid 10 and even my NAS Raid 10 arrays were too slow for my liking and putting it on an SSD was an immense improvement. Of course those were also 7200rpm WD Black drives, and not these 15k Server SAS drives. But it's still a concern I have. That's of course assuming the DB performance in Ubuntu is the same as it is on Windows.

[mastrmind11 717]

Thanks,

 

I've been thinking about giving more friends/family access to the system which currently my system can't handle. And since a lot of my content is in x265 if they want to watch stuff it will need to transcode. Where as the majority of the Emby clients I have in my house can play x265 natively, and with the new FireTV stick going 4k soon all of my Emby clients will play x265 natively. I just don't want to have to worry about someone watching a movie and the transcode process sucking up valuable resources that are needed for myself or a show that it's currently recording etc.

 

I'm also concerned about overall performance. As in, even with 15k SAS drives, would Emby's DB run better without a virtual disk layer slowing it down. On my current Emby VM I had to move the DB to a VHD on an SSD to boost performance because the local Raid 10 and even my NAS Raid 10 arrays were too slow for my liking and putting it on an SSD was an immense improvement. Of course those were also 7200rpm WD Black drives, and not these 15k Server SAS drives. But it's still a concern I have. That's of course assuming the DB performance in Ubuntu is the same as it is on Windows.

There's always going to be virtual overhead, but there are plenty of members here who run in VMs.  I run dockerized Emby, switched from bare metal almost 2 years ago, and have not noticed any performance issues.  I also don't have any issues w/ 7200k NAS drives in a mirrored ZFS pool either. Then again my library is only about 500 movies and 350 episodes.  But, like I said, and especially w/ x256 content, you're not going to get anything out of going hardware acceleration, the tech is still very buggy.  And with that server, even if you had 5 people remotely transcoding x256 content, I'd be shocked if your box couldn't handle it.  At the end of the day, you have nothing to lose setting it up in parallel to what you're using now and banging away on it.  Not like it's hard to wipe an OS/VM/etc and try something else.  I've been extremely happy w/ the dockerized Emby, so maybe give that a try first.  GL

[RedBaron164 18]

Thanks, looks like I'll build the box out as a Hyper-V host and keep running Emby as a VM.