Time to Deprecate Plex VM

I’ve been running Plex since 2017 and for all this time it has been installed in an Ubuntu Virtual Machine via a Deb Package. This has been extremely reliable and I’ve been able to upgrade the underlying Ubuntu distribution and Plex versions without issue.

The basic Virtual Machine has remained relatively unchanged over time with the following specs:

• 8 vCPU (8 CPU cores given to Virtual Machine)
• 8 GB virtual Memory
• 30 GB virtual Storage Disk (4 Disk ZFS RAID 10 SSD array)
• Media mounted via NFS (was SMB prior to Windows 2012 R2 File Server decommission) to HDD NAS (4 Disk Btrfs RAID 6 array)

As the underlying Virtual Machine host has lots of CPU cores available I have never added a GPU for Transcoding, opting to just keep adding CPU cores as required.

In my last post Windows 2012 R2 Decommission I mentioned about a problem that would change my whole architecture.

Transfer Speeds

Whilst copying all the data over Samba from my M1 Max MacBook Pro over Gigabit Ethernet and having the Plex server access the files using NFS over Gigabit Ethernet it seemed like everything was going perfect. Transfer speeds of > 100MB/s were achievable in both directions.

However, over Wi-Fi connecting over Wireless AC I was only getting around 10MB/s. Transfer speeds to the old Windows 2012 R2 server over Wi-Fi were about 40-45MB/s. Nothing else in the network had changed.