Blue Iris in VM with External Backup (via USB) ? General question

[austwhite]

I am very new to Blue Iris and NVR's in general. I apologise if this type of question is posted elsewhere, please redirect me if it exists.
I am currently in process of building machines in a VE using a Core i7 4770K with 24GB RAM. I have ProxMox VE running bare metal with a home automation program and OpenMediaVault running in VM's.
I can set aside 4 vCPU's and about 12GB RAM (based on current usage) for Blue Iris and I will be looking at 4 to 6 4MP cameras.
I have a 2TB internal WD Purple drive that will be dedicated to recordings. I also have a 6TB external USB (3tbx4 mirrored) that I wish to utilise for backup/long term storage.
What I would like to acheive is the following:

• 24/7 Low res (vga quality is okay) recording.
• Motion Detection events recorded at Hi res.
• Primary recording device is the 2TB Purple, hoping to be able to hold at least 7 days worth on this.
• Backup storage - USB device, hoping to put all data older than 7 plus days out to this.

I want the above to work pretty well automatically and seamlessly if possible so all I need to do is open the "app" or webpage to check footage if needed.

Firstly, I guess I need to ask is it doable?
Secondly, any guidance (or direction to existing documentation) would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[IAmATeaf]

I’d start by testing the achievable speeds you’re likely to get when moving data from the 2Tb to the USB within a VM.

General advice is to run BI on a dedicated machine, some do run as a VM but only you can decide if it works.

BI will need setting up and the latest version does allow you to monitor on a lower res sub stream and then record the higher res stream but this will all need to be setup and tested until you are happy.

I would look through the forums and do lots of reading as only you can set it all up and test to see if it meets your needs.

 

[austwhite]

Thanks @IAmATeaf .
The speed of the hardware should be fine for the camera setup I have envisaged and the read/write speeds are not going to be a big issue.
I was more after advice on how BI would handle it, particularly the automatic archiving. I'll keep reading, but the reason I posted was because I did not find the specific information I was after, particularly regarding archiving footage to the external drive.

 

[IAmATeaf]

BI can move clip and recordings, that’s no real issue and is pretty easy to setup but when moving it can be very resource intensive so you’d need to test this to make sure that it’s not overloading your system.

I personally don’t move things around and just have the required storage within the BI machine itself so that video is directly written to the drives. The only thing BI then needs to do is remove older clips as storage fills up which in my case means deleting a 1Gb file as that is the size limit I have set and deleting a file doesn’t really impact on resources for any length of time.

 

[austwhite]

@IAmATeaf
In an ideal world I would like to have all storage internal, but I am kind of working with what I have and the base machine is in a SFF case so no room to add any more HDD's internally (I already have a 480GB SSD for PVE and Image storage) and I have the 2TB Purple in it already. I wanted to avoid having to pull out the purple to put another drive in as I have no use for the purple elsewhere. That's why I was wanting to offload archives to an external device
Glad to know BI can do the archiving/moving. I will have to research a lot more with that.
Thanks for all the information so far. I am pretty green when it comes to NVR's and particularly Blue Iris, but I think it will suit my purposes better than any of the Linux based alternatives.

 

[IAmATeaf]

You could maybe consider moving the drives in your USB enclosure to a NAS? Assuming that the drives in it are just standard SATA drives. But again the performance of NAS drives do vary, I think the later/newer are much better in terms of throughout.

I have a NAS, an old Buffalo Terastation with 4 6TB drives in it but the overall performance isn’t that good so I only use it for backing up other machines and as a media server.

 

[austwhite]

I might have to consider that, though technically USB 3 has better performance than Gigabit ethernet. I'll might have to buy a NAS for external storage eventually. The old DNS-323 I have collecting dust wont cut it because it only does the equivalent of 100mbps speed (I think I got it to max out at 13Mb/s at one point, not good)

 

[IAmATeaf]

That’s exactly the problem I have with my Buffalo, has 2 gig network ports but the thing maxes out at about 20.

 

[biggen]

I, too, run BI in VMs. I think your plan will work. As @IAmATeaf pointed out, you can setup BI to move clips/archives to different storage directories pretty easily. I have BI move clips out of the "New" storage directory when it gets full (which is a 12TB pass through disk in my xcp-ng host) and into the "Stored" location (which is another 6TB pass through disk in the same host). When the "Stored" location finally gets full it begin deleting.

I have two different locations on two different hosts (one is Proxmox while the other is xcp-ng). One host is supporting a 13 cam VM. I have 6GB of RAM and 4 cores assigned to it. The other host has a smaller two camera BI VM with the same 6GB of RAM and 4 cores assigned. I have had ZERO problems running BI like this and its been about a year running on the xcp-ng host now.

 

[austwhite]

@biggen
Good to have additional information there. It sounds like my plan to give 4 cores and 12GB RAM should work okay with 4 to 6 4MP Cameras.
I'll see how it goes. I just have to get my head around all the options

Edit: I was just looking over flea-bay and found a 4TB WD Purple for $95 (Australian Dollars) listed as brand new, unopened. I might change the 2TB out for the 4TB and give myself some extra space. At that price I couldn't just ignore it.