need some help picking hardware and software for a possible VM machine for running PFsense and PLEX

Conoxis · February 28, 2019

Hello there,

Just a quick disclaimer: While I may look like a tech wizard to friends and family, ill probably look like a 5 year old on here. This is my first post so hopefully I'm asking this in the right place.

I'm planning on really broadening my horizons with my home setup because I am very tired of using multiple drives to store and transfer movies and TV. Right now I have 3 computers:

1) i7 8700k on a Z370 board on water, 2x8gb ram, gtx 1080, and a ssd boot drive.

2) i7 4600U laptop with 16gb ram and a gtx 730.

3) i7 2600k on a z77 board on air, 2x4gb ram, gtx 1050ti and an ssd boot drive.

#1 is my main desktop that I use for gaming that I built a while back.

#2 is my old laptop I used for school until I purchased a surface pro. Now it just sits collecting dust.

#3 is my old desktop that I used to game on until I built my latest desktop. Its now an HTPC in the living room and is way overkill for 1080p playback. I rarely game on it.

I have a lot of drives lying around and I've been reading up a fair bit on Plex and I think its the way to go considering all my options. Before I go any further though I've also been reading up on PFsense because my old router is (pardon my french) shit. I have a decent access point lying around the apartment that I bought a few months ago planning on using and never got a round to throwing in. I can use that and save myself a lot of money by going with a PFsense machine and a network card.

On to the main question. I've got a lot of "Media Center" machines that I like to use like my Apple TV and my Xbox ONE. I use them constantly with external drives and both myself and my girlfriend are tired of the extra hardware. Would one of those machines that I posted handle a Plex server and PFsense, both as virtual machines, being able to handle the encoding to various different devices? Probable no more than two encoding streams at once will be necessary. A side note is that I would like the machine to be able to handle the encoding, and handle the encoding of a VPN embedded in PFsense. I would also like to be able to access it on vacation. Probably going to limit that to one encoding stream. To clarify something, on my main desktop (#1), I would like to be able to still game on it at 1080p, while all of this is running in the background, I'm doubtful though.

I'll be following up these questions with many more on different configurations of software and virtual machines but the main thing I need to know is whether or not I should be going for a workstation PC with a xeon processor off ebay for cheap and selling some of my existing hardware.

Also, I know that PFsense is going to require VT-d soon so I'm not entirely sure if the 2600k will work.

Thanks in advance, and please be critical! the more I learn the better off I am.

hopefully I don't sound like an idiot!

Acedia · March 1, 2019

Specwise any of those should be able to handle it.

Electronics Wizardy · March 1, 2019

I wouldn't run your router in a vm, it makes it harder to trouble shoot. And then if that system hosting the router goes down for any reason the whole network is down.

Id get something like a edgerouter. Its a basic wired only router with lots of advanced features. Probably fine for your use here as you don't seem to need any advanced network features.

7 hours ago, Conoxis said:

I know that PFsense is going to require VT-d soon so I'm not entirely sure if the 2600k will work.

I think you mean aes-ni. I don't think pfsense is doing anything with vt-d or vt-x for that matter.

The simple approach id do is just plug plex on the current htpc, and you can make a software raid array if you want more storage with storage spaces. You can use hyper-v for vms if you want.