Best OS for server

[madhatr 3]

I am redoing my setup. Currently I run server on a old HTPC running Windows 8.1 with MCE, but I am building a virtualization server. It will be running vSphere and ESXi. It has 128gb of ram, 2 Xeon E5-2670 CPUs which are 8 core 2.60ghz processors with hyper-threading giving me 32 cores to work with. I will be using the server to have a gaming machine to stream games to my Nvidia Shield TV, 2 or 3 HTPCs, router, NAS, torrent server, etc. What I was wondering is what would be the best OS and amount of resources to give to the EMBY server? Linux? Windows, if so should I run it on Server 2012R2? Pretty much I have any to pick from. Also for the server does it need a good video card GPU for transcoding? I have a GTX 760 that I was going to run the game machine through, but can use it for the EMBY server.

[legallink 187]

My experience is the best OS is the one you are most familiar with. That being said, the base Emby install is developed for Windows. I use Windows 10'simply because I can and don't need mce. Easy, everything is installed the way I want it, drives are pooled the way I want them, etc.

 

The more creative with your install you want to get, the more familiar with that OS you need to be. It sounds like you are fairly adept in your knowledge base.

 

Several more advanced users on here are running Windows server, virtual environments and Linux. The Linux guys typically have "share" or access issues.

 

The needs of Emby, from my experience, are fairly minimal. What takes a bit more is,dependent on use case, and for,at of base media. The only thing that really takes a lot of resources is ffmpeg. If you are transcoding, I would barter two cores per transcoding stream. I haven't gotten Emby to use more than a few GB of ram. I have 32 GB and never pass 8 with Emby. And no, it doesn't need a good gpl. Transcoding is done on the CPU.

[madhatr 3]

I figured Windows was the basis of it, but Linux would have much less overhead. At one point I was going to use unRAID, since it had a mediabrowser plugin but since they haven't bothered even changing the name of it to Emby shows me that they don't keep up support for it. I really want to limit the container for Emby's server so it is running in as clean of an environment as possible, less chance of other background activities getting in the way. 

[essjay 3]

I was just about to ask the very same question. In my case I'm running unRAID and again have a choice of operating systems for Emby.

 

I currently have it running on Windows 7 Pro and it seems to be doing fine. I've assigned 2 physical (plus Hyperthreading so 4 cores) and it seems ok (i7 4790). It was transcoding a 1080p movie yesterday and stuttering very occasionally so might need to bump that up a bit. 

 

unRAID has an Emby Docker which I believe is maintained by Emby themselves. That's what I was thinking of using but I figure it uses Mono to run .NET code on Linux. if that's the case it might just be best to stay native on the Windows platform.

[legallink 187]

Overhead between linux and windows shouldn't be much of an issue given that Emby is fairly light, unless you are running a lot of other things or support a lot of users.  But everyone's use case is different.

[madhatr 3]

Well I would like to plan for the future, with the fact that the video is being sent to 4k TVs, and most of my content is 1080p. The issue that concerns me is that I need to upgrade all of my content to a higher resolution, everything SD looks really bad and flickers on 4k, and I can see the h.265 writing on the wall. My old server was bottle-necking running h.265 for 4k plus trans-coding for portable devices like tablets I have and a Roku 3 I gave a friend with cancer so she will always have access to content. Luckily with the virtual machines I can bump up the memory and CPUs until the bottle-neck goes away. Nice to see it still runs well on Windows 7 Pro since I have old HDTV tuners that don't work on anything newer than Win7. I think I will be running with Win7 Pro then and strip out just about everything, turn off most of the services and it should run pretty smooth without Windows getting in it's way.

[SUNMorph 0]

I am redoing my setup. Currently I run server on a old HTPC running Windows 8.1 with MCE, but I am building a virtualization server. It will be running vSphere and ESXi. It has 128gb of ram, 2 Xeon E5-2670 CPUs which are 8 core 2.60ghz processors with hyper-threading giving me 32 cores to work with. I will be using the server to have a gaming machine to stream games to my Nvidia Shield TV, 2 or 3 HTPCs, router, NAS, torrent server, etc. What I was wondering is what would be the best OS and amount of resources to give to the EMBY server? Linux? Windows, if so should I run it on Server 2012R2? Pretty much I have any to pick from. Also for the server does it need a good video card GPU for transcoding? I have a GTX 760 that I was going to run the game machine through, but can use it for the EMBY server.

 

OFFTOPIC

 

i hade the same idea with the gaming solution. But i read many stuff about the passtrough of nvidia cards in ESXI.

 

What i read is, that you can passtrough the card but you cant get the nvida drivers to work for gamstream. Nvidas drivers detect any VMWare OS. Also manualy editing the .vmx files should not work. Nvidia detect the virtualization. Only the Desktop GF should work in Virualized OS.

 

How you handle the passtrough?

[kkhan 16]

My perspective is slightly different.  If you need high availability I would not use a desktop operating system as a dedicated OS server is designed to be "up" all the time.  If availability is not critical, then by all means use a desktop OS but be aware that these also have limitations on the number of simultaneous connections into the server.  I use Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials for the these two reasons - high availability and a large number of simultaneous connections.  I could have gone for Windows Server 2012 R2 but that was significantly more expensive for the unnecessary benefit of an unlimited number of connections.  And, of course, the final reason is that I am familiar with the Windows platform.

 

My experience is no BSODs in two years of near continuous operation.

[colejack 30]

I'm using Windows Server 2012 R2 in a VM with now 12 vcpu's and 8GB RAM.