VM or on Physical Server

[dannieboiz 13]

I just complete my home server and installed a new NAS and has let everything run for over a week now. I think I'm comfortable enough to start moving my data around. 

 

The server is a Xeon x3440 with 16Gb ram running server 2012 in a workgroup using as my DNS and DHCP server.

 

NAS is a Netgear Readynas 4200 V2 with 12 Bays, only 2 2Tb drives would be used in an Flexraid 1 to hold my important data and it'll be also backed up again via USB and Crashplan. The rest will be used as JBOD for the movies and random stuff that I don't care for. 

 

Debating on if I should put Windows 8.1 as a VM on the server and run MBS or just drop it directly on the physical box. Since I do need the server to transcode, wouldn't putting it on the VM loose some of the transcoding power? 

 

 

[Beardyname 194]

I just complete my home server and installed a new NAS and has let everything run for over a week now. I think I'm comfortable enough to start moving my data around. 

 

The server is a Xeon x3440 with 16Gb ram running server 2012 in a workgroup using as my DNS and DHCP server.

 

NAS is a Netgear Readynas 4200 V2 with 12 Bays, only 2 2Tb drives would be used in an Flexraid 1 to hold my important data and it'll be also backed up again via USB and Crashplan. The rest will be used as JBOD for the movies and random stuff that I don't care for. 

 

Debating on if I should put Windows 8.1 as a VM on the server and run MBS or just drop it directly on the physical box. Since I do need the server to transcode, wouldn't putting it on the VM loose some of the transcoding power? 

 

Depends, but either option should be fine really, I think the ffmpeg process is limited to a couple of cores/threads anyway (Mine is running on all cores but then again i only have the two)

[elcabong 48]

I have a virtual machine setup for mediabrowser server and playon, which both encode, and i havnt had any issues.  im using a windows 7 virtual machine, and would assume 8.1 would work fine as well provided you enable hardware passthrough for the vm.  i set 4 cores for this vm and ffmpeg seems to use all of them, i havnt tested with more to see if there is limit.

 

i like running peripheral software in vms so i can keep my main os to minimal tasks, mostly as a vm host so its easier to deal with hardware failure, just move the hard drives + vms to a new host, set resources and your good to go.  not as easy moving the main os between mobo/chipsets especially on windows based machines.