Plex in ESXi...CPU and Resources configuration questions

Angry

Angry

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 27, 2006
Messages
482
I just recently threw together a ESXi host, and have been playing around with it.

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Specs:
Phenom II X4 965
8gb DDR3 1333 (soon to be 12-16gb)
Biostar TA970
2x Intel PCI gigabit NICs (adding PCIe cards later)


Right now I have Plex loaded up in a Win7 64bit VM with just two cores shared to it.
This seems fine for my TV shows, but blue ray rips and DVD rips are left to my media server (in sig) with its Core i3 2100 (and its intel quick sync). One blue-ray rip casting to a Chromecast eats the cpu alive sometimes.
My streaming devices involve the 3 Chromecasts, multiple android tablets and phones with the Plex app and Chrome browser itself. usually 2-3 streams max here. The biggie is the chromecast in the living room.

My idea is to, turn my media server into strictly a file host and upgrade the ESXi host to a 8 core AMD FX. And give Plex 8 core of the FX cpu.

My question is, will I see an improvement going from the Core i3 2100 to 4 cores of the FX cpu inside of ESXi?
 
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My first gut reaction is that plex would run slower. First because the IPC is lower on a 8 core FX and secondly because that 8 core is only 4 modules.

With the FX you might be able to run more load and perform more work "overall" but the performance of that ONE VM may actually end up becoming a performance decrease.

Phenom II processors were very close in performance to Intel Core based CPUs. Unfortunately they arrived onto the market 18 months too late.

Plex can use 4 core.


Dropping in a 1090T, doubling your RAM and giving plex 3-4 cores should increase performance a decent amount.

If you REALLY want to beef things up, buy a i7 2500 or 2600, with a large aftermarket heatsink. The 3x00 series is clk locked based on threading. The earlier 2x00 intel processors are heat load dependent. If you stick a decent heatsink onto a 2600 it will sit at 3.4Ghz all day and all night with all cores running. And since the IPC for nehalim based Intel CPU is roughly 25% higher than your current Phenom II it's would compare to your Phenom II running at 4.25Ghz.
 
I think plex would run better on the i3. Replace it with an i5 and no contest.
 
I'm just about in the same boat.
I'm about to finish my build. I'll have a dual Xeon X5450 and 24gigs of RAM. So, would it make a huge difference if I put 4 CPU's instead of 2 at it? And, I figure I'll put 4gig's of memory.
 
JeffBlair said:
I'm just about in the same boat.
I'm about to finish my build. I'll have a dual Xeon X5450 and 24gigs of RAM. So, would it make a huge difference if I put 4 CPU's instead of 2 at it? And, I figure I'll put 4gig's of memory.
Click to expand...

This was going to be my other thought.

I was looking a dual Xeon E5645's down the road. And dedicating one whole cpu to it. The VMs i run could have the other CPU all they want.


Then again...throwing in a 2600 or 2600k in place of the i3 does seem easier...I can keep VMs on the Phenom II....
 
i3-2100 has a passmark score of 3636, which may be able to do 2 1080p transcodes. The X4 965 has a passmark score of 4256, so it's not much better, 2 1080p transcodes at the most.

An i7-2600k has a passmark score of 8530, that's the way I would go. The Xeon X5450 only has a score of 4190, theoretically two of them would still be worse then an i7-2600k. The dual E5465s though, you're looking at a 10657 score for each of them.
 
Should consider 1366 and go for low power CPUs.... SINGLE L5639 / L5640 has a passmark of almost 7K and you can get them $30-50 and boards cheap too.
 
Just remember, with ESXi tossing more vCPUs require those resources to be available or it can actually bring performance down. If you have 8 vCPU dedicated to the VM and another VM is using one of them, they have to take turns processing.

I've got a Plex VM (actually runs Emby also) on an ESXi host with dual Xeon X5650 procs and the sweet spot I found for it was 4 vCPU. However, I rarely transcode more than 1 stream at a time. All my DVD/Bluray rips are done with Roku devices (hard wired) in mind, making sure that they can direct stream. A single stream over LTE to my Iphone (transcoding from mkv to mp4 at 3 Mbps/720p) uses a maximum of 30% CPU on the VM. That would give me a theoretical 3 streams over LTE (though my 60/6 connection wouldn't support all 3 anyways). The only time I've run into a performance issue was trying to stream an MKV of a blueray made with MakeMKV (direct rip, 25 GB file). Sometimes it works great, sometimes I get buffering errors, and once I've gotten a message that the device isn't fast enough to stream the selected media.
 
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