PMS 4.0...PMS 5.0...PMS 6.0...No PMS 7.0! Plex/Storage server upgrade [PICS]

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IamSpartacus

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Mar 14, 2016
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Build’s Name: Plex 4.0
Operating System/ Storage Platform: Unraid (in place)
CPU: Xeon E5-2680v3
Motherboard: SuperMicro X10SRM-F
Chassis: Node 804 (in place, still searching for short depth storage chassis)
Drives: 8 x 10TB WD Golds (in place)
Drives: 2 x Optane 900P 280GB 2.5" drives for cache pool
Drives: 4 x Samsung 950 Pro 512GB NVMe drives for high performance shares
Drives: 1 x Micron 5100 Pro 960GB drive for downloads/various fast storage needs (in place)
RAM: 64GB DDR4 (in place)
AOC: Intel X520-DA2
AOC: Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2
AOC: ASRock Ultra Quad M.2 card

Power Supply: EVGA SuperNova 650w Gold PSU
Other Bits:

Usage Profile: Main purpose of this upgrade it to give myself a little more transcoding headroom (Xeon E5-2680v3 should be about a 50% performance increase in this area) over my Xeon D-1541 while also giving me some extra vCPUs for VMs.

Will post some pics/details as parts start arriving.
 
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IamSpartacus

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Mar 14, 2016
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If you’re doing encoding of 4K I hear the quadro P2000 cards are amazing.
Yes, the P2000 cards work very well.
Yes, I'd love to add a P2000 right now but it's not supported fully in Linux right now. I run my Plex server in a docker and have no intention of moving it back to a VM. I'll wait for full support before adding one.
 

rubylaser

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Jan 4, 2013
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Yes, I'd love to add a P2000 right now but it's not supported fully in Linux right now. I run my Plex server in a docker and have no intention of moving it back to a VM. I'll wait for full support before adding one.
Do you mean the UnRAID specific distro doesn't support it yet? Because, Nvidia GPU decoding does work in Plex docker containers in Ubuntu and other distros right now.

How to setup Nvidia HW acceleration in Ubuntu Docker?
How to correctly install nvidia-docker2 on Ubuntu 16.04LTS
NVIDIA/nvidia-container-runtime

I understand why you wouldn't want to switch away from UnRAID, but I wanted to make sure you knew that people do have Nvidia GPU transcoding working in Docker on Linux.
 

IamSpartacus

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Mar 14, 2016
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Do you mean the UnRAID specific distro doesn't support it yet? Because, Nvidia GPU decoding does work in Plex docker containers in Ubuntu and other distros right now.

How to setup Nvidia HW acceleration in Ubuntu Docker?
How to correctly install nvidia-docker2 on Ubuntu 16.04LTS
NVIDIA/nvidia-container-runtime

I understand why you wouldn't want to switch away from UnRAID, but I wanted to make sure you knew that people do have Nvidia GPU transcoding working in Docker on Linux.
Well I more meant that it can't do both encoding and decoding like it can in Windows. This is a Plex limitation which should be solved in a future update.

But yes, I realize that Unraid doesn't work because it doesn't support the Nvidia drivers.
 

gigatexal

I'm here to learn
Nov 25, 2012
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Yeah it’s the encode that sucks. I might have to go the windows route if I got a p2000 just for this issue. Luckily I have only ever one or two streams happening at a time. Though it would be really nice for making copies of my media in many formats ahead of time. But then if I did that I’d just set the cpu to do it and wait instead of forking over 500 usd for a card I don’t need.

Come on Nvidia make it work in both decode and encode in Linux!
 
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jmck

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Apr 4, 2013
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It's not a limitation on Nvidia's part, it's Plex. Some people have compiled ffmpeg on their own with hardware decode support and swapping it into Plex, still a no go. It's an issue Plex needs to address.
 
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K D

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Dec 24, 2016
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Yes, I'd love to add a P2000 right now but it's not supported fully in Linux right now. I run my Plex server in a docker and have no intention of moving it back to a VM. I'll wait for full support before adding one.
You should be able to pass through the igpu to your plex docker in unraid with the 2176G. Haven't tried with this gen CPU but works like a charm with V5 and V6 E3s. I doubt you will ever need a dedicated GPU.
 

Ixian

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Oct 26, 2018
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He'd still run up against the problem of Unraid itself not supporting Nvidia drivers, which will rule out Docker.

As others have said though the 2176G has the P630 IGP which is pretty kickass in it's own right and will probably be more than good enough for hw duties. And will work with Dockers, including Unraid's implementation. I doubt an external GPU is needed here but if it is running it in a VM is the only way to use it under Unraid.
 

Ixian

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Oct 26, 2018
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Where did you source the mb&CPU by the way? They seem to be hard to find, at least in the US.
 

IamSpartacus

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You should be able to pass through the igpu to your plex docker in unraid with the 2176G. Haven't tried with this gen CPU but works like a charm with V5 and V6 E3s. I doubt you will ever need a dedicated GPU.
Need is a strong word :D. But I am curious to see someone benchmark the modern Intel iGPUs vs something like the P2000 just to have some idea of the difference in terms of transcoding potential.

Where did you source the mb&CPU by the way? They seem to be hard to find, at least in the US.
MoBo from Superbiiz and the CPU from ShopBLT (they special order it as they dont keep stock).
 

K D

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Dec 24, 2016
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He'd still run up against the problem of Unraid itself not supporting Nvidia drivers, which will rule out Docker.
Sorry if I was jot clear. I was referring to the P630 which is supported under Unraid docker.

Need is a strong word :D. But I am curious to see someone benchmark the modern Intel iGPUs vs something like the P2000 just to have some idea of the difference in terms of transcoding potential
Did a very loose comparison earlier. P2000 passed through to an esxi 6.5 VM running win 10. About 15-20% GPU utilization per 4k h265 stream. All the files were Blu-ray remixes about 60-80gb each. 2 issue I faced were that every so often the PMS will crash and sometimes encoding will use the GPU but CPU will still be maxed out. The whole thing did not feel very stable.

I'll try to do a better comparison when I get some downtime.
 

IamSpartacus

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Sorry if I was jot clear. I was referring to the P630 which is supported under Unraid docker.



Did a very loose comparison earlier. P2000 passed through to an esxi 6.5 VM running win 10. About 15-20% GPU utilization per 4k h265 stream. All the files were Blu-ray remixes about 60-80gb each. 2 issue I faced were that every so often the PMS will crash and sometimes encoding will use the GPU but CPU will still be maxed out. The whole thing did not feel very stable.

I'll try to do a better comparison when I get some downtime.
When testing, what quality were you transcoding those 4k x265 files down to?
 

K D

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Dec 24, 2016
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Had some old screenshots. This was a debian VM with igpu pass through and 4 cores/4 gigs

cpu.png
taut.jpeg
 

IamSpartacus

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Had some old screenshots. This was a debian VM with igpu pass through and 4 cores/4 gigsView attachment 10093
View attachment 10092
Nice! Thanks for the screenshots. I'm feeling better and better that the E-2176G with the iGPU passed through will perform great for my needs.



On an unrelated note, I think I've decided to ditch the Optanes because I don't see how I can connect more than one of them to my system along with the rest of my spinners without needing multiple HBAs. So now I'm just looking for a few high write/high IOPS performing SAS3 12Gbps drives.
 
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IamSpartacus

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Wow so one thing that completely went over my head was how expensive RAM is for this platform. $225ish per 16GB??? We're talking $850-$900 for 64GB of RAM. WTF. I paid less than $500 total for the two stips of 32GB DDR4-2133 RDIMMs for my current system.

Am I missing something here?