What high spec server would you choose for 50 cameras?

[danletkeman]

In the end the xeon v3 is a ~10 year old plattform and does not boost very high to todays standards. Also a small number of old sas disks with raid 6 isn´t the best choice for lot´s of small writes. But it should be able to handle a single camera in a vm setup for sure. What exactly does not work "smoothly"? the recording or live view?

Yes the CPU is roughly 8 years old now. A different server is in the future plans, as I have some other VM's I need to run in this location. The disk access is actually quite good for what it is. The small write throughput is faster than my new M.2 SSD in my desktop so I am confident disk access is not a problem.

I think it is a BI configuration issue. I took the camera home and tried it again, and I had the same issue at home with the camera. After messing with the settings on the camera, and re-adding it to BI a few time I got it to work. I am now going to compare my home configuration with the server in question.

Recording, live view and clip playback were slow. The remote desktop instance to the server was fine and accessing things was reasonable as long as the CPU was not pinned. I am wondering if I had something setup incorrectly with QuickSync and it was trying to decode when it clearly couldn't due to the spec of the CPU. Since it's a new install I might reinstall and try again. I am waiting for some different cameras to arrive as well at least to test.

 

[danletkeman]

"...Further, BI doesn't recommend VM or RAID "



NO.

RECOMMEND - It's only a suggestion. Again this is not directly from the developer, and no reason was stated.

So you are saying that you cannot produce actual documentation of your claims?

 

[sdkid]

RECOMMEND - It's only a suggestion. Again this is not directly from the developer, and no reason was stated.

So you are saying that you cannot produce actual documentation of your claims?

I'm not trying to run BI in a VM environment. I don't see the need to do so when BI is proven effective on dedicated hardware. You can feel free to research that all you want-- and I hope you can get it to work for whatever purpose you're trying to fulfill.

 

[spuls]

Recording, live view and clip playback were slow. The remote desktop instance to the server was fine and accessing things was reasonable as long as the CPU was not pinned. I am wondering if I had something setup incorrectly with QuickSync and it was trying to decode when it clearly couldn't due to the spec of the CPU. Since it's a new install I might reinstall and try again. I am waiting for some different cameras to arrive as well at least to test.

did you change the cpu profile to high performance? The vmware default for a whitelabel box will be "balanced" => you cpu would not boost up to full speed. More cores won´t help a lot in this case since you have only a single camera.

 

[Flintstone61]

There are 2 places where Hardware acceleration have settings. 1 is Global, and 1 is per camera.
Check that the Global setting is off.

 

[danletkeman]

There are 2 places where Hardware acceleration have settings. 1 is Global, and 1 is per camera.
Check that the Global setting is off.
View attachment 162278

Yes, I have turned them both off. I found that it makes no difference on my configuration at home where I just have a desktop, but when I turned it on on the system with the Xeon processor, I had all kinds of odd video issues like large blocks, flickering and green screens. I didn't try removing the camera and re-adding it after turning it off though. Maybe that would help.

 

[danletkeman]

did you change the cpu profile to high performance? The vmware default for a whitelabel box will be "balanced" => you cpu would not boost up to full speed. More cores won´t help a lot in this case since you have only a single camera.

Yes, this is a Cisco server and it has always been running ESXi so that setting was already set.

 

[danletkeman]

I figured out my issue today. Turns out I had to set the hardware decoding on the camera from "default" to "no". For whatever reason I think it was still trying to use the GPU even though it was already disabled in the main settings. However that didn't solve the entire problem. I also found that when I setup the first and the second camera that I tested with that I had the bitrate type set to CBR and for whatever reason these Empiretech cameras will default the max bit rate to a really now number which in turn will make the video very choppy. This resulted in choppy recording and playback as the camera was limited in how much data it could send.

All that said it had absolutely nothing to do with running it on an older CPU without Quick Sync and most importantly it had nothing to do with running it in a VM. Just silly setting mistakes my part.