I’m currently running Roon core on my Windows PC with a pair of KEF LS50 speakers + R400b sub. I have been thinking about a getting a NUC to host both Roon and Plex with a NAS for storage. I would not be using both at the same time. I do use DSP but fairly minimal - just the parametric EQ filter.
I was wondering if anyone has hosted both Roon and Plex on the same server, and if so, how is it working for you? Any recommendations on processor, RAM and operating system would be appreciated. Thanks!
I would definitely go with Linux distribution of your choice and run Plex and Roon in containers on top of that.
I would choose the 10th gen Nuc with the i7 six core CPU (to cope with running both Roon and Plex in the same system and you might need the CPU power as those softwares evolve) and 32GB memory (16 would probably be more that enough, but memory is quite cheap). 256 Disk to run the OE and containers + the disk for your media (Size depends on the amount of Movies and Audio you have)
I have been running Roon and Plex server on the same Windows computer for years. First on an old NUC i5 with 16gb ram and now on an nine year old i7 (self built) also with 16gb ram. I have never had performance issues and I use convolution in Roon dsp. But I also mostly use one zone at the time in both Roon and Plex.
Thank you for the HW and OS recommendation! I had wondered about if I should run the applications in docker or not or if that would just be unnecessary overhead.
If you want to run Docker on Windows, CPU must support virtualization. In addition, Docker for Windows is a different flavor and it might be an issue of running docker apps that were compiled to run on Linux. Overall using Docker is a good idea. It gives you easy access to Plex through IP address on all your computers in the house. It is also a good idea to pick CPU that will allow Plex to do hardware acceleration. It is mostly used for both video and audio transcoding. I’m running Roon core in docker. I’m not sure if there is a complete Roon (client+core) docker app. If you are planning to use this NUC for Plex and Roon, then maybe instead of Windows, it will be better to install Ubuntu. This will solve the compatibility issues with linux docker apps. As for performance. Docker does not really require a lot of PC resources.