Plex, Hyper-V and Live Migration

Software & Operating Systems Windows
1

Plex, Hyper-V and Live Migration…Is this a thing? I am inexperienced when it comes to running a home server and I what I currently have is powerful (power hungry) but a basic setup. I would like to take it to the next level and your feedback would be appreciated…

I was reading a little about Live Migration and thought it would be cool to implement for plex to save power (Make the setup more efficient). But I am not sure if this is possible or worth the effort so I would like to get your guys feedback.

I am running a Dual Xeon E5-2670 with 32GB of ram with Windows Server 2012 with a few VM’s (one for Plex, one for Blue Iris etc…). The server has about 7 hard drives in it. This consumes about 120watts at idle. Mainly have this much power for Plex and Blue iris. I regularly have 5 transcoding streams of Plex with high bit rate media. Really like the system as its super smooth but its thirsty. It goes a few days just sitting idle with no load then usually on Weekends/holidays/late nights everyone jumps on Plex.

I was thinking of having a separate machine that is lower powered (intel i3 ~50 watts idle) that hosts the VM’s and storage. Then when higher load is needed the Xeon computer would wake up and server plex. Currently the computer runs idle 70% of the time and if I went from 120W idle to 50W idle it would save me $90 in electricity every year (over simplifying this and expect this value to be less). The logical steps of what I would like to do would be as follows:

VM Plex on i3 computer
Someone accesses Plex
i3 computer turns on Xeon computer
VM Plex migrates to Xeon computer
Xeon computer serves Plex
After 30 min of no activity VM Plex migrates back to i3 computer
Xeon computer goes to sleep

A few questions for this

  1. Is it possible/sane to do this?
  2. When migrating a VM from one machine to another how does the internal IP address work? Does it stay with it?
  3. How would I trigger to wake a computer when someone accesses the plex VM? Would this be at the router level when someone accesses the port or would this be done through some type of script or within Hyper-V? I have a PFSense router so im sure I can figure out how to send a WOL packet when the Plex port is accessed but I would think there would be a better way to do this internally.
  4. I am sure I am forgetting something but feedback would be great if you have the time.

TL:DR I want to live migrate a Plex VM to save electricity and just to do it.

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