This bare-metal host serves as the primary compute and transcoding engine. Running a bare-metal Linux distribution guarantees that the Plex and Unmanic runtime environments retain native, low-latency access to hardware kernel modules and raw GPU execution pipelines without hypervisor abstraction.

During the initial Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS installation wizard, bypass automated disk layouts and partition your high-speed solid-state drives manually:

1. /dev/nvme0n1 (256GB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSD): Allocate the entire disk to the root mount point (/) to host operating system files, system binaries, and localized application logging pools.
2. /dev/nvme1n1 (1TB PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSD): Format this drive as an independent ext4 or XFS volume. Mount it explicitly to /mnt/plex_cache.
3. Rationale: This isolates volatile write operations generated by Unmanic and Plex Transcoder Cache from your primary operating system storage array, protecting the OS drive from premature write endurance wear.

To ensure your hardware-accelerated transcoding engine utilizes your discrete NVIDIA graphics processor, deploy the proprietary, headless kernel-level modules immediately following the first boot:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install --no-install-recommends nvidia-driver-535-server nvidia-utils-535-server -y

Modify your Netplan configuration file to map your dual physical network adapters explicitly. Ensure that your storage network card remains entirely locked out of inter-VLAN routing tables.

Open /etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml (or your default YAML configuration) and apply the following profile:

/etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml

network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    enp3s0: # NIC 1 (VLAN 20 Public DMZ Ingress)
      dhcp4: no
      addresses:
        - 10.0.20.50/24
      nameservers:
        addresses: [1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1]
      routes:
        - to: default
          via: 10.0.20.1
    enp4s0: # NIC 2 (VLAN 50 Storage Backplane)
      dhcp4: no
      addresses:
        - 10.0.50.50/24
      # CRITICAL: No default gateway or DNS is specified on this link

Apply the configuration cleanly:

sudo netplan apply