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Recommendation for rack mounted ESXI server

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devastator

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bobfather

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There's limited information on the internet about doing passthrough of Intel HD Graphics on ESXi.

It would be super easy to test though. Install ESXi and add a Windows 10 Guest. Make sure the hardware supports VT-d and then check in ESXi to see if you can passthrough the Intel Graphics to the Win 10 guest.
 
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Intel GPU pass-through is really hit-and-miss. It works on some systems, but not on others. I tried it on my oddball ESXi system at home (running on a Gigabyte Brix with i7-4770R CPU) and Windows couldn't initialize the passed-through iGPU. Driver issues, basically.

Anyway if you have a decently new CPU it might be worthwhile to buy a compatible motherboard and transplant everything into it. Why isn't your current motherboard compatible? The specs of the case don't seem to indicate a major compatibility problem. Oh, apparently ATX is 305x244mm and micro ATX is 244x244mm while that case only supports up to 305x191mm. Why on earth would they even suggest compatibility with those standard form factors then???
 
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devastator

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Yep, I have a micro ATX which is a bit bigger than that.
I'm using an I5-3330 for now (but without ESXI)
 
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If it is only a 3rd generation i5 then it really isn't worth buying a new motherboard for. Maybe you can find a used mini-itx board for less than $50 though. Hopefully you only have two sticks of RAM for it.

I don't know if you'll be able to pass-through the iGPU for that generation, since my experience trying to pass through a 4th gen was unsuccessful.
 
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bobfather

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I run Blue Iris on a virtualized system with a i7-3770. I only run 2 cams though. Without QuickSync Blue Iris uses ~7% CPU running as a service. I do all my viewing through the smartphone app, but the usage goes up somewhat when I open the interface on the computer that runs it.
 
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devastator

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Have you tried running it with gpu passthrough ?
Any idea about the power usage of your system ?
 
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bobfather

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No, and I likely will not since in my case it requires bringing down critical systems in my home for testing.

Power use of the system isn't very knowable because there'd be no way to segment out how much energy is being used by a given VM. Last I hooked it up to a wall it used about ~70 watts at idle, though.

In reality, others have done testing and have had little or no success. Pass through of graphics cards is a huge pain with anything but consumer AMD cards or workstation Nvidia cards. And of course none of those support QuickSync.

If I get really curious and try it out one day, I'll post here about it.
 
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bobfather

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Ok for what? As a Blue Iris system running on bare metal, it’ll be great. For running on ESXi I think you’ll be disappointed.

By the way, I had some time this morning to mess with my ESXi setup. To remind you, I run an i7-3770 with VT-d support. I enabled pass through for the Intel GPU and rebooted ESXi. Luckily everything came back up fine. Then I passed through the GPU to the Windows 10 Pro VM where I have Blue Iris installed.

It booted correctly the first time around. When I opened Device Manager I saw the VMware VGA driver and a Microsoft Basic Display listed. Shortly after opening Device Manager (and I suspect right after Windows 10 automatically tried to install drivers for the Intel GPU), the VM froze. Every time I would restart it thereafter it would boot to a black screen or show no video input at all. At present, it doesn’t seem that ESXi 6.5u1 is very compatible with Intel GPU passthrough.
 
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bobfather

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As a second attempt to help you, I spun up a brand new Windows 10 machine from scratch. With pass through of the GPU enabled Windows 10 finished installing fine, but I had the same issue of booting to a black screen as soon as the install was done. Powering down the VM and removing the GPU resulted in an immediately-working Windows 10 install.

I fully believe it’s 100% a driver issue. I’m not sure how to proceed because there doesn’t appear to be a single case on the internet of someone getting this working.
 
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devastator

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@bobfather: thanks for trying.
Which version of esxi are you using ?

EDIT: nvm, i saw you used 6.5. Although I've seen some positve results...
 
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ceef

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This post may not be too terribly helpful for you @devastator, but I'm running BI on a Win10 VM using ESXi 6.5. My CPU (Xeon X5677) doesn't support quicksync, however. I'm running 4 good cameras at ~20fps w/ CPU (4 cores) usage of ~35%. I did pass-through the RV670 video card, but it hasn't really been helpful as my intent was to pump that display into my AV system so I could watch the feeds on the TVs. This hasn't really gone well as Win10 only detects the display when the AV receiver is looking for it.
 
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devastator

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@ceef: You have any idea about the power consumption of your system ?
I've read somebody got it working on a Xeon, just curious about how much power it draws ...
 
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pricklydevil

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I've got BI running in a Windows 2012 Server VM on ESXi 6.0u3 with no GPU apart from the VMWare SVGA adapter. I believe 6.5 has passthrough broken and I won't be upgrading until ESX6 is end of life (2020). Works absolutely perfectly without issue, either on recordings or playback. I've also run it on baremetal (i3) and really can't tell the difference between virtualised and baremetal.

ESXi host is an Intel Xeon E5-2660 (16 cores) with 128gb RAM. Camera setup is two Reolink RLC-420 and two Hikvision DS-2CD2342WD-I 2.8 mm. Direct recording enabled with graphics from the camera, doing motion based recording and BI chews around 18-26% CPU irrespective of recording or not, as a service.

VM is configured with 8 vCPU (overkill) and 8gb RAM (again overkill). Recordings all go to a locally passed through 2tb HD. Will reconfigure it at some point to use less RAM/vCPU.

Power usage, tough to say as it sits in a rack with 2 switches (24 port Non-POE and 8 port POE) and several other systems but the whole thing draws ~200w consistently.
 
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pricklydevil

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I agree, it's only cause of me doing other things that I have the E5. An E3-1220v2 (4 cores/4 threads) / E3-1230v2 (4 cores / 8 threads) or similar would most likely suffice without drawing stupid amounts of power.
 
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Comissha

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While we are not directly using ESXi, we are using a Windows Server 2012 VM in our vSphere Data Center in a clustered vCenter- Settings are 6 virtual processors Xeon-2630 v3 @ 2.4GHz, 16gb RAM, using 30 cameras at multiple locations across the state and current usage is 45% CPU, 40% Memory...if that helps.
 
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