freenas and windows 10 VM

[bpherbst]

I plan on running freenas primarily as my file server and windows 10 VM for plex, couchpotato, torrent downloader. I know there are jails for all those but they've been broken on me too many times and permissions are always tough on a noob like me. So I was thinking of doing the VM (the hard part will be installing the VM I bet) but once its installed it will be a breeze. My question is how should I allocate ram and cpu's.

cpu: xeon 1220v3 4 cores 4 threads
memory: 16gb ecc ram
hard drives: 3x8TB i believe in raidz1

i have videos with possible up to 3 1080p streams at once.

I guess my two questions for cpu is 2/2 or 1/3 3 being the windows 10 VM? and ram should I allocate 4 gb ram to vm leaving 12gb for freenas?

 

[chrisada]

The 1220v3 single thread passmark score is about 1900. That is roughly when you need for one 1080p transcoding with Plex.

Of all 3 concurrent streams need transcoding, you will need 3 cores allocated. I bet for most time of day the number of stream is 0 or 1, so personally I won't give the VM 3 of 4 cores. Maybe 2. This is why people likes jails.

For RAM, maybe start with 4GB for the VM. Although I'm guessing you will need 6 or 8 for it to run smoothly. Which might leave a bit too little for FreeNAS with 24TB raw storage.

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

 

[bpherbst]

Thanks for the reply. It sounds like I'm short on ram and cpu power I can throw in a 1245v3 which is a 4 core 8 thread. Does that change things at all?

 

[kdragon75]

Never give a VM the number of physical cores you have in a system or half the number of physical cores in a dual CPU system. Performance will tank.