Blue Iris - Setup Dilemma

Hello,

I'm planning several aspects of my home network, including NAS and Security Cameras (4 to 6 cameras, top).

For my NAS I'm almost sold on FreeNAS, but when sizing the hardware I need I'm not sure whether I should include a Blue Iris VM or not.

It looks like the consensus on this forum is to use bare metal for Blue Iris.
I'm struggling with the decision on whether build a bigger FreeNAS server and add BI on top of it, or just have a minimal FreeNAS build and BI on its own hardware.

I'm not sure I will be saving power going a particular route. I was hoping some of you might have experiences you could share in terms of your BI vs NAS requirements and current setups.

Thanks,
R. Rod

My BI setup keeps 8TB of disk space busy. 99.9% of it is continuos motion recordings of the last 14-21 days that I’m unlikely to need. I review most motion clips within a few hours and if they’re “save worthy” (which is also pretty rare), I’ll export them. For me, that means none of my BI disk space is NAS-worthy.

My BI box is a dedicated headless system (w/ two 4TB WD Purples) that runs in the closet with my networking gear/alarm system/coax (TV) runs.

You probably already read this, but the recommendation to run BI on bare metal is usually for performance. In virtual environments, it can be hard for BI to use the processors’ QuickSync feature which it uses to offload h.264 decoding from the processor. This isn’t to say that BI in a VM can’t handle loads, ... it’s just usually less efficient.

Not uncommon to see folks post about wanting to run BI in a VM on a server with honking big Xeon processors. Of course running BI on a separate box with Intel Core processors would use less electricity, but if those folks are going to keep the Xeon server running for other projects regardless of BI, maybe BI running inefficiently in a VM wouldn’t be that much more (electricity wise) than the Xeon server + a separate BI box...

My thought is that running BI on a separate box and having a less powerful box for your FreeNAS is the safest way to go. There’s a good chance that a beefier box running FreeNAS + a BI VM would work, but it’s no guarantee.

I have a Supermicro server that runs all my KVM VMs including FreeNAS, BI, and a bunch of others. I gave my win10 VM running BI 4 cores with a 1T iscsi volume to the FreeNAS VM and it's running well. I'm still setting things up with multiple cameras, so I'm not in steady state yet and can't comment if this will continue to work well. Once I have everything complete, I'll start a thread with my setup.

I consolidated to a single physical HW box with VMs years ago. I have one physical hardware system to manage and update, backups of the VMs are painless, and if I need another "computer" for something (like BI), I just spin up another VM. That also means when this box dies, *everything* is down. If you go this route, prepare for disaster recovery. I have the expertise to set this up and maintain it, what I've done isn't for everyone. If you're unsure, heed the advice here and on the FreeNAS forums to use multiple physical devices.

Thanks @Alan commike. Definitely good insights. I understand the single point of failure argument, and it is part of what I'm struggling with.
I haven't decided yet, I can see both sides of the argument.
My needs will be:

• Home Automation - currently running Home Assistant on a Rpi 3B.
• Security Cameras - Must likely BI
• NAS

Off course once you go the Home Automation route you want to start playing around with things like databases, containers for specific activities, etc.
On that sense the server + vm/docker makes sense.

It would be nice to have visibility on your setup once it is stable and you publish about it. Looking forward to seeing it published.

Thanks again!
R. Rod.

You could always check out Unraid too. I've been using it for years and am upgrading the hardware now for a VM with BI on it with IGD passthrough so BI can utilize the Intel Quicksync. It has a lot of support in the Unraid forums when many apps. Mine runs all of my TV Shows, Movies, OpenVPN, and soon a VM with BI on it.