I currently have 2 home servers which I want to consolidate into a single ESXi 6.5 host (running on an HP Microserver Gen8 with a Xeon E3-1265L CPU and 16GB RAM).
The 2 servers are currently used as follows:
- Windows Server 2008
- Blue Iris IP camera monitoring (12 cameras)
- Web server (low traffic) - Lubuntu 20.04
- Logitech Media Server
- Home Assistant (home automation server)
- File server
- Mediawiki server (low traffic)
My question is, should I consolidate these onto a single guest Windows OS (all of the applications could run on Windows if necessary), or should I keep a separate Lubuntu VM for the applications listed above, and leave Blue Iris and the web server on their own Windows VM?
As the Blue Iris application is probably the most resource-intensive (it occupies a steady 40-60% CPU throughout the day), I was thinking that isolating it on a separate VM would mean that it would interfere less with the performance of the other applications if they were on a separate Lubuntu VM.
Any views on whether 2 VMs would be better than one from an overall performance perspective?
