Config. advice

[armwt]

So, about to embark on my XPEnology adventure.

 

I'm planning on running it in a VM under ESX.  I already have reasonably beefy hardware for the host - dual hex core and 128gb of RAM, and will have other VM's running as well.

 

Two main questions:

 

1) With this level of hardware - worth running Plex inside of DSM, or would it make more sense to simply run a separate VM for Plex?  All video storage will definitely be on shares from the XPEnology VM.  Don't anticipate heavy transcoding, 2 streams at most, but I don't know how much RAM I can (or should!) assign to the xpenlogy VM.  I also anticipate running Sonarr and Radarr, and possibly a few other add-ons to compliment Plex.

 

2) Regardless of whether I run plex inside of DSM or as a separate VM...  is it worth splitting Plex video storage off onto a separate volume, or just lump everything together?  My experience with Synology currently is limited to their older single-drive units, which I've used for years, but volume management has never entered the equation.  I have an 8-bay case with enough drives to fill it, but have a friend selling some (relatively) cheap 8TB drives that I'm thinking of grabbing just for the video storage.  I don't see plex storage being critical enough to require shr-2 levels of redundancy, while I'd like a bit more protection for my "main" storage, with personal documents, PC backups, and VMware storage, etc.  It has me wondering if it is worth a separate volume just for Plex.  Thoughts?