09-09-2025, 10:53 PM
I've had both methods where everything was on one box running in VMs (router, plex, NAS, DNS, home automation, game server, dev box, and a misc playground server) as well as individual bare metal servers for all that stuff. I liked the VM method since it was easy to bring up/down servers and only had one physical piece of equipment to maintain. On the flip side (as I'm experiencing) one machine brings all those servers/services down when it goes down. The separate hardware was a pain to keep maintained, but those were also specialized built servers to sit in the rack. I'm thinking with small Pi machines I would have a standard image for the most part. Similar hardware to maintain and if one goes down, it's not taking the rest with it. I think a Pi Plex server would be OK. The transcoding isn't top notch, but if all your clients can handle the same video format (.mkv, .m4v, etc..) making sure your videos are converted to that format, then you shouldn't have to worry about transcoding at all. I use Handbrake for videos that I get that happen to be 4K and convert them down to a 1080p MKV format...