Options for a multi-purpose always on machine

[freddyq]

Hi all, I'm way overdue setting up a solution to record footage from my (currently) three Dahua IP cams which I've had in place a few months now. I've finally got round to it so I'd appreciate some guidance as I'd like the solution to have multiple purposes

So my requirements for the solution are:

• Record and manage IP camera footage
  • I should also be able to view the feeds on my mobile phone
  • It would be nice if I could view the feeds on my TV
• Run a VPN server so I can secure my home network
• Run a Ubiquiti Unifi controller to manage my APs
• Be a media server/NAS for my documents, photos and movies
  • I should be able to view my photos and stream the movies on my TV
  • I should be able to access my documents from anywhere on a laptop and my phone
• Be compact, quiet and energy efficient
  • I already have monitors and peripherals in the location where this will go
  • As it will be always on, I do want to make sure it is as energy efficient as possible
  • Compact would be nice but if that sacrifices computing power, future-proofing or inflates the cost too much then I would drop this requirement

Just a point on the media server/NAS requirement - in the past I've been advised on this forum to use a separate device for this use-case as using a NAS for camera footage can wear it down quickly due to the high volume of read/writes. I'm not sure if this still holds true but if it does, I'm perfectly OK setting up a separate NAS solution. I just wanted to include the requirement for awareness in case there is an all-in-one solution I can consider.

Sorry about the lengthy post but I'm hoping with this information I can get some useful advice on the best solutions to consider.

Thanks!

 

[LittleBrother]

I’d say a small PC fits the bill.

As for read writes hurting something yes but not soon enough to matter. Took years of a microsd on my cube camera to finally wear out. I’m now around six years in using external USB drives—one per camera seriously taped to my pc—as the 24/7 storage for cameras. Three cameras with one recording to an internal mechanical drive and two others each to these usb mechanicals and they are still going strong!

 

[freddyq]

I’d say a small PC fits the bill.

As for read writes hurting something yes but not soon enough to matter. Took years of a microsd on my cube camera to finally wear out. I’m now around six years in using external USB drives—one per camera seriously taped to my pc—as the 24/7 storage for cameras. Three cameras with one recording to an internal mechanical drive and two others each to these usb mechanicals and they are still going strong!

Interesting! I'm guessing a PC can act as a NAS? For a small PC what are the key specs I should look for given what I intend to use it for?

Also, I would have thought it would be cheaper to have one internal or external hard drive with enough capacity for all cameras to record to it, than to buy separate ones?

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[bp2008]

With sufficient cooling and proper mounting to prevent excessive vibration, hard drives should last a long time even under heavy use.

There are a number of choices for how to build a NAS / virtual machine system. At home I have both a FreeNAS and an unRAID in separate boxes. Both with ECC memory, as that is a common recommendation for NAS systems to help prevent data corruption. Both boxes can run virtual machines and whatnot, although I think unRAID's support for this is better. I also like that unRAID lets you add disks any time with relatively little hassle compared to what is involved for FreeNAS. I have a third server that runs vmware ESXi which is just a hypervisor for virtual machines and IMHO does a better job of that than any NAS operating system. But ESXi doesn't include NAS features. You can run FreeNAS as a virtual machine in ESXi but that setup is more complicated and I don't do it. I'm actually planning to phase out the ESXi box as soon as I upgrade the CPU in my unRAID box.

I'd definitely run Blue Iris to manage the cameras. While this is best done on a dedicated machine, lots of people run it in a Windows virtual machine without issue. These days you can configure Blue Iris to be really efficient so it isn't as big a deal not having hardware acceleration available.

The most efficient system would be something NEW rather than something old. Asus PN50 is a really small but surprisingly powerful computer, particularly if you can obtain the version with a Ryzen 7 4800U processor. I don't think it supports ECC memory though. If you'd like a proper "server-grade" build with ECC memory, you could base it on something like SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SDV-TLN4F-O Mini ITX Server Motherboard Xeon Processor D-1541 FCBGA 1667 - Newegg.com or maybe find another Mini ITX server board for Intel or AMD. Right now AMD's latest CPUs should be a bit more energy efficient than Intel's.

 

[freddyq]

With sufficient cooling and proper mounting to prevent excessive vibration, hard drives should last a long time even under heavy use.

There are a number of choices for how to build a NAS / virtual machine system. At home I have both a FreeNAS and an unRAID in separate boxes. Both with ECC memory, as that is a common recommendation for NAS systems to help prevent data corruption. Both boxes can run virtual machines and whatnot, although I think unRAID's support for this is better. I also like that unRAID lets you add disks any time with relatively little hassle compared to what is involved for FreeNAS. I have a third server that runs vmware ESXi which is just a hypervisor for virtual machines and IMHO does a better job of that than any NAS operating system. But ESXi doesn't include NAS features. You can run FreeNAS as a virtual machine in ESXi but that setup is more complicated and I don't do it. I'm actually planning to phase out the ESXi box as soon as I upgrade the CPU in my unRAID box.

I'd definitely run Blue Iris to manage the cameras. While this is best done on a dedicated machine, lots of people run it in a Windows virtual machine without issue. These days you can configure Blue Iris to be really efficient so it isn't as big a deal not having hardware acceleration available.

The most efficient system would be something NEW rather than something old. Asus PN50 is a really small but surprisingly powerful computer, particularly if you can obtain the version with a Ryzen 7 4800U processor. I don't think it supports ECC memory though. If you'd like a proper "server-grade" build with ECC memory, you could base it on something like SUPERMICRO MBD-X10SDV-TLN4F-O Mini ITX Server Motherboard Xeon Processor D-1541 FCBGA 1667 - Newegg.com or maybe find another Mini ITX server board for Intel or AMD. Right now AMD's latest CPUs should be a bit more energy efficient than Intel's.

Thanks for this. I need to learn about virtual machines as I've never used or set them up also need to read up about freeNAS and unRAID.

If there are any useful posts on here already to educate on these things please do point me in their direction.

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[bp2008]

Not that I'm aware of, however both operating systems have their own forums with guides, and you can google for comparison articles and videos.

 

[freddyq]

Not that I'm aware of, however both operating systems have their own forums with guides, and you can google for comparison articles and videos.

OK thanks I'll look there. And just on the specs for a PC, is there anything other than ECC memory I should look for? I will look for relatively new models to cover the efficiency point.

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[bp2008]

Well for virtual machine purposes, more CPU cores is better, and you need to have enough RAM for all your virtual machines as well as the base operating system.

FreeNAS is particularly demanding on RAM - I think the recommendation (which may be out of date) is to have 1 GB of RAM per 1 TB of raw storage capacity. Although for higher numbers like 32+ TB of storage, you don't really need to follow that rule as strictly. I have 11x 6TB drives in my FreeNAS (66 TB raw) with only 32 GB of RAM and it is fine. Although I'm not using any of that RAM for virtual machines. And I'm not using the deduplication feature (which also demands more RAM). But I am using compression on quite a bit of my data (which also demands more RAM I think).

 

[freddyq]

Well for virtual machine purposes, more CPU cores is better, and you need to have enough RAM for all your virtual machines as well as the base operating system.

FreeNAS is particularly demanding on RAM - I think the recommendation (which may be out of date) is to have 1 GB of RAM per 1 TB of raw storage capacity. Although for higher numbers like 32+ TB of storage, you don't really need to follow that rule as strictly. I have 11x 6TB drives in my FreeNAS (66 TB raw) with only 32 GB of RAM and it is fine. Although I'm not using any of that RAM for virtual machines. And I'm not using the deduplication feature (which also demands more RAM). But I am using compression on quite a bit of my data (which also demands more RAM I think).

And silly question maybe but why does this all need to be done using virtual machines? Why couldn't I just install BlueIris, the VPN, Unifi controller and setup the NAS all just on whatever PC I buy for this?

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[LittleBrother]

I’d say a small PC fits the bill.

As for read writes hurting something yes but not soon enough to matter. Took years of a microsd on my cube camera to finally wear out. I’m now around six years in using external USB drives—one per camera seriously taped to my pc—as the 24/7 storage for cameras. Three cameras with one recording to an internal mechanical drive and two others each to these usb mechanicals and they are still going strong!

Interesting! I'm guessing a PC can act as a NAS? For a small PC what are the key specs I should look for given what I intend to use it for?

Also, I would have thought it would be cheaper to have one internal or external hard drive with enough capacity for all cameras to record to it, than to buy separate ones?

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You can with software expose its attached storage as proper NAS devices. In my case I just use Windows sharing, created a local user account in Windows, and my cameras write through the file share. Although any future camera I will be using microsd only. It provides quicker access and IMO higher reliability than a mechanical drive.

 

[biggen]

And silly question maybe but why does this all need to be done using virtual machines? Why couldn't I just install BlueIris, the VPN, Unifi controller and setup the NAS all just on whatever PC I buy for this?

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Disaster recovery. If the system goes tits up you can just restore the VM(s) and be up and running again in no time.

 

[freddyq]

Disaster recovery. If the system goes tits up you can just restore the VM(s) and be up and running again in no time.

But I thought the VMs are still using the physical system's storage so if it dies, the VMs would lose the data too? Or do you mean all the setup and configurstion of the VMs could just be restored whereas in the no VM scenario I'd have to reinstall and setup everything again...?

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[biggen]

But I thought the VMs are still using the physical system's storage so if it dies, the VMs would lose the data too? Or do you mean all the setup and configurstion of the VMs could just be restored whereas in the no VM scenario I'd have to reinstall and setup everything again...?

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The VMs would lose all the data back to your last backup of said VM. Of course, if you don't backup your actual recordings at all (I don't) then those recordings would be gone for good in the event of a drive crash. But all the hours you spent on the configuration of all those VMs would be preserved back to your last backup so a simple restore is easy to get up and running.

 

[freddyq]

The VMs would lose all the data back to your last backup of said VM. Of course, if you don't backup your actual recordings at all (I don't) then those recordings would be gone for good in the event of a drive crash. But all the hours you spent on the configuration of all those VMs would be preserved back to your last backup so a simple restore is easy to get up and running.

Thanks, this is useful. Must admit I'm not convinced I'm planning to have a setup complicated enough to use the VM route for it's DR capabilities. I'm sure BlueIris has a way of backing up my setup/configuration, same goes for VPN and the rest could be covered by Windows backup and restore. This might sound ridiculous but I'm thinking out loud and will also read about pros and cons of VMs...

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[biggen]

Its all what your comfortable with. Running everything in VMs certainly isn't required. Most here don't. I do it because I've been using virtual environments for years and am very comfortable doing so. There isn't anything easier than taking a backup (automated of course so you don't ever have to think about it) of a VM, storing it somewhere safe, and then restoring it to new hardware.

Yes, I think you can backup BI and Windows. Its all manual though. You would have kick it off manually, store it somewhere, and then figure out how to get it up and running again. I've never used Windows Backup so I have no clue how that works. BI backup probably involves some sort of registry "hacks" and saves.

 

[freddyq]

Its all what your comfortable with. Running everything in VMs certainly isn't required. Most here don't. I do it because I've been using virtual environments for years and am very comfortable doing so. There isn't anything easier than taking a backup (automated of course so you don't ever have to think about it) of a VM, storing it somewhere safe, and then restoring it to new hardware.

Yes, I think you can backup BI and Windows. Its all manual though. You would have kick it off manually, store it somewhere, and then figure out how to get it up and running again. I've never used Windows Backup so I have no clue how that works. BI backup probably involves some sort of registry "hacks" and saves.

Thanks understood. I guess for me it might be a gradual process of just getting a PC up and running with everything I need and then moving to using VMs maybe in future once I see the use-case for it and have the time to invest in it

 

[bp2008]

And silly question maybe but why does this all need to be done using virtual machines? Why couldn't I just install BlueIris, the VPN, Unifi controller and setup the NAS all just on whatever PC I buy for this?

Virtual machines absolutely are not a requirement. You could run all those things on the same Windows OS as Blue Iris. It does lock you into Windows so you'll want to disable automatic updates in order to keep it from rebooting all the time without your permission.

If you want good backup and restore for Windows, I suggest you forget Windows Backup exists and use a third-party product instead. I use a paid version of Macrium Reflect at work and on my home desktop, and for my mom's PC. It creates a complete disk image which (in the case of the paid version) can be updated daily by only storing the changes that were made from day to day, so it is fairly efficient to store a complete copy of boot drive where you have all your programs and configuration. You just have it backup to a different drive -- preferably on a totally separate computer -- and in case your boot drive fails you can easily restore its content on a new drive.

 

[freddyq]

Choosing Hardware for Blue Iris

Buy refurbished. Don't build or buy new. The most cost-effective Blue Iris computers are refurbished business-class systems such as "HP EliteDesk" and "Dell OptiPlex". You can usually get a good deal by searching [URL='http://www.ebay.com/']Ebay[/URL] for specific CPU model numbers, and...

ipcamtalk.com

Found this post really useful!

 

[bp2008]

@freddyq

If you don't end up running Blue Iris on a separate system, you'll want something a fair bit faster and with more memory than recommended in that wiki page, in order to accommodate the machine's other tasks. Especially if you want to run Plex or something to stream your media to other devices. Plex can be a resource hog when it needs to transcode video.

Also if you want a lot of storage in your "NAS", you'll probably not be happy with any of the used HP/Dell/Lenovo computers; they come with a minimal number of drive bays and the power supplies and motherboards are also limited in expansion capacity.

 

[freddyq]

@freddyq

If you don't end up running Blue Iris on a separate system, you'll want something a fair bit faster and with more memory than recommended in that wiki page, in order to accommodate the machine's other tasks. Especially if you want to run Plex or something to stream your media to other devices. Plex can be a resource hog when it needs to transcode video.

Also if you want a lot of storage in your "NAS", you'll probably not be happy with any of the used HP/Dell/Lenovo computers; they come with a minimal number of drive bays and the power supplies and motherboards are also limited in expansion capacity.

Oh...ok. I was just looking at a 7th gen core i5 with 4 cores and 8gb ram. Not sure now what I need to look for. In terms of the NAS am I better off just using separate hardware for that requirement and then finding a suitably powered machine for BI + VPN and the Unifi controller?

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