CCTV woes

[Badaz52]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm having an absolute nightmare with Hyper-V on an old PowerEdge R710 with dual Xeon E5649 processors 2.53ghz, 96GB of RAM and running our CCTV software.

 

I have allocated both of our CCTV VM's 32GB of RAM and 16 VCpus (2 sockets). They are both running Blue Iris and reach 100% CPU each and stay there constantly forever in a day even when there is no motion being detected.

 

In total, we have around 45 cameras on each VM recording at 15 FPS and a mixture of some 1080p and some lower but changing the resolutions makes no difference.

 

I'm not certain if Hyper-V is the problem here or if Blue Iris is but considering I am running no other VMs on this Hyper V server I'm shocked that these Xeon's don't appear to be able to handle it.

 

Does anyone else have a large number of cameras like us and what software are you using? I looked at Milestone but I can't get the school to invest so heavily when I don't know if I'll bump into the same issues or not.

[Danthecreator]

With out any hardware decoding/encoding you would struggle to use BlueIris with that many camera's we use a i5 6 core running 25 1080p camera's and the cpu usage is about 6-9%

[Badaz52]

With out any hardware decoding/encoding you would struggle to use BlueIris with that many camera's we use a i5 6 core running 25 1080p camera's and the cpu usage is about 6-9%

 

So you think the issue is that these are VMs and not on bare metal?

[Danthecreator]

BlueIris uses intel Quicksync I don't think that the xeon's have that built in you could hook up a graphic's card and use the nvidia gpu decode / encode but we just run on a bare metal install using the i5 because of the Quicksync support.

[Koldov]

Some very interesting points here:

 

https://ipcamtalk.com/wiki/choosing-hardware-for-blue-iris/

 

It includes the point above from @Danthecreator - it also says it isn't optimised for multi-socket servers and has calculations for what CPU you need to run at X MP/s.

 

EDIT: Refreshingly, they seem quite humble and certainly own up to limitations of their software...

 

 

"Generally speaking, if you can appreciate (and afford) an enterprise-grade server platform, your needs will be better met by enterprise-grade video management software instead of Blue Iris"

 

"If you are considering running such a heavy load that Blue Iris would be unable to handle it with a single CPU, then you should be using different software."

Edited May 12, 2021 by Koldov

[fredesq]

It's known that Blue Iris performs badly in a VM - over on reddit.com/r/homelab you will always be told to run it on a baremetal server.