Question VMs under Windows 2012 for media server, cameras, and misc

[Lil'John]

Hardware:
E3-1246v3 (4/8 core)
SuperMicro X10SLH-N6-ST031 (this is proprietary board with six 10GbE ports )
8BM Ram (will upgrade as I figure out what I need)
MANY 4tb drives using DriveBender for 50TB drive pool

Software:
Windows 2012 Server
DriveBender to pool drives
BlueIris for camera duties
JellyFin for media server duties

Is it worth going VM for BlueIris and JellyFin? Possibly a "web browser" VM to make isolating downloads for virus scan.

My thought on BlueIris in a VM is being able to easy physically isolate my camera network by using one port going directly to DLink POE and all cameras. It has been a while since I've played with MS VMs but I recall being to assign network ports directly to a VM.

 

[igor_kavinski]

That server doesn't have a lot of computing power because it's quite old now. Running VMs would slow down the software inside the VMs even more, especially if the workload of that software is I/O bound. I/O takes a significant hit inside VMs. My office has the V2 Xeons and the memory bandwidth and disk performance inside Hyper-V VMs can only be described as atrocious. Give it a try if you want. My guess is that you will regret it.

 

[mxnerd]

@igor_kavinski SSD/NVME is cheap now. Just run VMs on SSD/NVME. NVME adapter is not expensive either.

 

[igor_kavinski]

@igor_kavinski SSD/NVME is cheap now. Just run VMs on SSD/NVME. NVME adapter is not expensive either.

Have a Samsung 980 Pro 1 TB in the server. That helps the VM a bit but still more than 40% performance hit in 4K I/O.