My success with VirtualBox and Blue Iris

ipcam2100

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Thought I would share my success with BI running on VirtualBox. I did some quick CPU test comparison and the CPU seems to lose about 10% due to the VM vs native, so I thought it was worth investing a bit more in the CPU so I could run Blue Iris on my Linux server. Because this turns into a Linux vs Windows debate, I'll go ahead and state I am biased towards Linux, and I also do not want to maintain two sets of hardward, so since everything else I have is already managed extremely well on my linux server, it made sense to virtualize the Windows instance.

Setup:
  • CPU - AMD Ryzen 3600X (6 cores, 12 threads)
  • Motherboard - ASRock B450M Pro4 (cheap but works very well)
  • RAM - 16 GB
  • Cooling - Cooler Master Hyper 212 (did not want to risk water cooling due to bad history with it)
  • Storage - 120 GB SSD for OS and 4 TB WD Purple for video
  • Network - Intel I350-T4 (4 port NIC) with one NIC dedicated to the Host OS and one dedicated to the Guest OS
  • Host OS - MX Linux (Debian based and VERY lightweight)
  • Guest OS - Windows 7 (minimal memory footprint while supporting enhanced virtualization)
I am running the VM in headless mode, configured to auto-start via the init.d scripts. It sends the ACPI power button to the guest Windows on system shutdown so the guest Windows starts and stops cleanly with the host. Dedicated 6 CPUs to the VM along with 8 GB of RAM, which seems to be more than enough.

Running the DeepStack object recognition in the guest OS as well, but this could be migrated to the host OS as the communication channel to from BI to DS is via HTTP interface. I do not plan to keep DeepStack as I have written my own object detection that I plan to use which is much more efficient, accurate, and no licensing mess to deal with. (plan to share this with the community when I get it finished up and packaged up as well)

So far I have six 1080p cameras streaming with direct to disk enabled to avoid CPU overhead. Currently when I connect via the web interface it shows I'm consuming roughly 10-20% CPU, so I'm pretty happy with that. I assume I can get this up to my goal of around 12 cameras without much strain on the system. Meanwhile I still have the other half of the system dedicated to my other Linux services.
 

biggen

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That looks great! I have two similar setups where I'm also visualizing BI and having great success. Glad to hear of another one going that route!
 

austwhite

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In some ways I am moving to do the opposite of what you are doing. I have my main systems as Windows, but will look at VirtualBox to run a couple of Linux servers on top of the Windows Host.
I have similar hardware specs to you, except mine is a core i7, so good to see it can work with 6 1080p cameras. I am using 5MP camera's myself so bandwidth and CPU should be similar.
Has there been any progress on your own AI to replace Deepstack, or have you decided to stick with Deepstack now that it has been open-sourced?
 

ipcam2100

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You should have no problem as you will be running Blue Iris natively. The VirtualBox instances either hosted on Linux or Windows is turning out to be a great way to build a whole new computer instantly without any additional hardware - really enjoying it so far.

I did make it further on my own object detection where it's detecting objects really well now at a good speed, but I got busy with several other things and have not gone back to wrap it up where others can easily set it up yet. Now that the holidays are mostly out of the way I should get back around to that. I'll have to check out Deepstack again if it is really open source fully - if so I may stop my efforts as I'm sure the open source community will do much better than I will at updates. :)
 
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