Blue Iris issues on Virtual Machine

J

Jeff Fabiani

n3wb
Nov 10, 2014
9
1
Hello everyone,

I am running Blue Iris v4 on an everyday windows computer with no issues. I want to rebuild Blue Iris onto a virtual machine to save some space in my computer room. Below is my scenerio and issue I am having, if anyone has any info to help me that would be great. Thank you in advance.

I am in the process of setting up Blue Iris onto a Virtual Machine to eliminate a physical machine in my house. I have read some forums where people have done this without issue. The setupis, server 2012 R2 running on a ThinkServer box with an Intel Xeon E3-1225 v3 @ 3.20GH and 8GB of RAM. From there I have Hyper-V installed and running a windows 7 VM with 4GB of dedicated RAM and 2 dedicated cores. The disk the VM is on is a RAID 1, 160GB. I have Blue Iris installed on that VM along with Antivirus and that is all. The issue I am having here is when I am logged into the BI web server and am trying to view recorded clips. When I click on any clip, BI crashes and restarts every time. From the web server, the clip doesn't play, it just says "connecting" and then I have to log back in to the web server, because BI has restarted. On the VM running BI, I have seen in the event log, an application event of "1000" relating to BI. On the VM, the RAM utilization is under 2 GB and the cores are under 50%. I can't seem to figure out what is going on here. Are there any known issues with BI on VM's? Any info would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeff
 
Jeff Fabiani said:
Hello everyone,

I am running Blue Iris v4 on an everyday windows computer with no issues. I want to rebuild Blue Iris onto a virtual machine to save some space in my computer room. Below is my scenerio and issue I am having, if anyone has any info to help me that would be great. Thank you in advance.

I am in the process of setting up Blue Iris onto a Virtual Machine to eliminate a physical machine in my house. I have read some forums where people have done this without issue. The setupis, server 2012 R2 running on a ThinkServer box with an Intel Xeon E3-1225 v3 @ 3.20GH and 8GB of RAM. From there I have Hyper-V installed and running a windows 7 VM with 4GB of dedicated RAM and 2 dedicated cores. The disk the VM is on is a RAID 1, 160GB. I have Blue Iris installed on that VM along with Antivirus and that is all. The issue I am having here is when I am logged into the BI web server and am trying to view recorded clips. When I click on any clip, BI crashes and restarts every time. From the web server, the clip doesn't play, it just says "connecting" and then I have to log back in to the web server, because BI has restarted. On the VM running BI, I have seen in the event log, an application event of "1000" relating to BI. On the VM, the RAM utilization is under 2 GB and the cores are under 50%. I can't seem to figure out what is going on here. Are there any known issues with BI on VM's? Any info would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Jeff
Click to expand...
I think your issues may be related to BI4 bugs...the software was released 4-5 days ago so as you are probably aware there are daily patched..Is your core utilization at 50 when you are viewing clips? or when recording?
I have seen others run on VM with no issues (BI3)
 
Thanks for the speedy response. That is a good point, I have not tried v3 on the VM to see if it is related to v4. Maybe I will try v3 to see if it fixes the issue.

The core utilization is far under 50% when trying to view the clips. At times it will hop up towards 50, but mostly it stays around 10-20%. It doesn't appear to be hardware related as my current functioning Bi system is running on a lesser CPU with the same 4GB of RAM.

I am going to try V3 on the VM to see if that changes anything and I will report back.
 
Bingo fenderman, that was it. An issue with v4 on VM's. I have installed v3 on the same VM and BI is not crashing when viewing clips in the web server.

I have v4 running on a separate physical machine that is not experiencing any issues, so this must be an issue with BI v4 running on VM's. Hopefully this bug can be fixed sometime soon.
 
Jeff Fabiani said:
Bingo fenderman, that was it. An issue with v4 on VM's. I have installed v3 on the same VM and BI is not crashing when viewing clips in the web server.

I have v4 running on a separate physical machine that is not experiencing any issues, so this must be an issue with BI v4 running on VM's. Hopefully this bug can be fixed sometime soon.
Click to expand...
Nice. It can also be something specific to the particular machine the vm is running on...just like users here running on standard machines..some have issues others have none...BI4 is simply not stable enough yet...im confident that it will be very shortly as the bugs are worked out...
 
Yes that could be as well. You are right, it is very new and not as stable as it will be. i will keep an eye on the updates that come out and keep testing it. I will report back with what i find as time goes on.
 
Jeff Fabiani said:
Yes that could be as well. You are right, it is very new and not as stable as it will be. i will keep an eye on the updates that come out and keep testing it. I will report back with what i find as time goes on.
Click to expand...

Sorry, I know this thread is old, but are there any updates on this?

I was planning on running BI on a dedicated box, but it would be nice if I could run it as a VM instead. It would still be the same box, but it would just be running one or two other VM's alongside it.
 
I'm running BI on a VMware box and having no major issues with the VM side of things.
 
rmw85 said:
I'm running BI on a VMware box and having no major issues with the VM side of things.
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How many cameras have you got? I plan to buy eight 4MP cameras. The hardware is powered by an i7-2600K, and 16GB of RAM.

I'm debating right now whether to leave it as a dedicated box, or run it as a VM.
 
Stealth22 said:
How many cameras have you got? I plan to buy eight 4MP cameras. The hardware is powered by an i7-2600K, and 16GB of RAM.

I'm debating right now whether to leave it as a dedicated box, or run it as a VM.
Click to expand...

My Server isn't too powerful but i'm running 4 Cameras. 2 1MP camera. and 2MP cameras. Running about 22% CPU on a Intel Xeon E5-2403 v2 1.80 GHz with 8 Gigs Ram. Also have Server 2012 R2 running on the server which has 4 2TB Drives in a Raid 1+0 Config. Plan on adding more ram and another Xeon 2403 to the mix to help it along
 
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I have had no issues with the VM for some time now. When this first became an issue, it was an issue with BI version 4 because it was very new. That was fixed with an update they released and it has been solid ever since. I am still running v4 on a Windows 8 VM, no issues at all. Hope that helps....
 
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Jeff Fabiani said:
I have had no issues with the VM for some time now. When this first became an issue, it was an issue with BI version 4 because it was very new. That was fixed with an update they released and it has been solid ever since. I am still running v4 on a Windows 8 VM, no issues at all. Hope that helps....
Click to expand...

Sweet, thanks!! I guess I'll give it a try with the VM first, and see how it goes.

How many cameras are you running? What resolution are they recording at?
 
I am running 4 cameras. 2 of them are running at 1280 x 720 while the other 2 are older cameras running at 640 x 480.
 
rmw85 said:
My Server isn't too powerful but i'm running 4 Cameras. 2 1MP camera. and 2MP cameras. Running about 22% CPU on a Intel Xeon E5-2403 v2 1.80 GHz with 8 Gigs Ram. Also have Server 2012 R2 running on the server which has 4 2TB Drives in a Raid 1+0 Config. Plan on adding more ram and another Xeon 2403 to the mix to help it along
Click to expand...

Jeff Fabiani said:
I am running 4 cameras. 2 of them are running at 1280 x 720 while the other 2 are older cameras running at 640 x 480.
Click to expand...

Alright, thanks guys. I've ordered my cameras...all eight of them are 4MP.

I'll probably give them a try with a VM first using the trial version of BlueIris, before I enter the license info. If it doesn't work that well, I can just re-build it as a physical PC.
 
Stealth22 said:
Alright, thanks guys. I've ordered my cameras...all eight of them are 4MP.

I'll probably give them a try with a VM first using the trial version of BlueIris, before I enter the license info. If it doesn't work that well, I can just re-build it as a physical PC.
Click to expand...
You cannot properly test using the trial because direct to disc does not work.
 
I still did the test. My CPU usage was kinda high but after i activated it dropped like a rock. I just wanted to test a few things out see how it worked and see if BI was for the most part right for me knowing that once i activate it would drop and be even better than my test.
 
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fenderman said:
if you deactivate before reinstalling it should be no problem...worst case you will need to contact support.
Click to expand...
Ok, great.

nayr said:
are you saving direct to disk? your VM offers absolutely zero hardware acceleration of video transcoding compared to a bare metal.. you likely cant even have the videos being displayed without hardware support.
Click to expand...

I know that post is from a different thread, but reading things like this is discouraging me from going with the VM route.

I'm thinking it would work much better if I install Windows Server on bare metal, and run BI on the physical machine.

@nayr, would it cause too much of a performance hit if I also made that server a Hyper-V host? It wouldn't be for more than 1 or 2 virtual machines, and I'd be saving at least 8GB of RAM for the host.
 
I am running Blue Iris on a VirtualBox VM on an iMac. I am wondering about the best configuration for disk storage. I am recording in bvr format and storing to the local "C:" drive which is, of course, part of the virtual disk image file.

Should I be using a network drive which maps to the host iMac file system for video storage? Would that be more efficient and a better configuration? (Since that involves windows-to-Mac SMB networking, I thought, at least initially, to avoid that complexity, but now want to consider all options to fine-tune the configuration.)

I have configured the Blue Iris storage folders ("New", "Alerts", "Stored", and "log") to be subfolders on my OneDrive folder so they are also synchronized to the cloud where I have a 1 TB OneDrive account. Is that a good or bad strategy for a simple backup/mirroring of the video streams?

Also, what is the best backup strategy? I think if i don't change Blue Iris configuration, then I only need an occasional backup of the virtual machine itself by shutting down the virtual machine, running my backup via Carbon Copy Cloner, then re-starting the virtual machine. (macOS Sierra new APFS file system will have snap-shot technology, but I don't expect the new file system to be ready for at least another year or two.)

Sorry for all the questions, but new to Blue Iris and really impressed by the program and its' features.

(ICYMI, long-time PC user/technology person who has migrated away from the PC to Macs so would really like to avoid having a physical PC again just for Blue Iris.)
 
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