reflection
Getting comfortable
Coincidentally, I was like you. I just bought two servers during black Friday to replace my old servers. I finally migrating everything over and powered them off last week. My new servers are not as powerful, but I switched to save power. The old servers was a dual Xeon X5670 with 96GB ram (still ran ESXi 5.1, never upgraded) and a dual Xeon E5-2680 with 192GB ram (ESX 6.5). They just were power hungry. The new servers are just Dell T40 with single E-2224G and I put 64GB ram in each. The ESXi 6.5 server is part of my vSphere cluster, but only powered on when I need to.Hmm, never saw this thread before...
I have been running Blue Iris on the same server since Nov 2014. I started out with ESXI 5 and currently running v6.7 with the latest patches installed (build 15160138 ). I currently have 11 cameras recording 24/7 (about 4,200 kB/s) and the CPU usage for that VM is around 35%. I also have about 6 other VM's running - server 2012 r2 essentials, PLEX, pfSense, HomeSeer3, etc). The CPU is Xeon E5-2630 v3 which was a little expensive back in the day - around $660, but it is still chugging along just fine. (I have 10 out of the 18 available logical cores assigned to this VM). The only thing 'passed through' are the hard drives using Raw Drive Mapping. If I do try to playback a video clip too fast, it gets a little sluggish, but other than that, it has worked very well for me. In fact, I was thinking of upgrading to a new server on Black Friday which would be 5 years of service, but I think I will go at least another year or two off of this hardware.
If you are using ESXI 6.7, you should really look into 'Veeam backup and replication, community edition' (which is free). Veeam makes a backup while the VM is powered up by first taking a snapshot which it will then delete when completed. I use the option to only include the 'system disk', the hard drives with the video files are excluded. (One of my Virtual Machines is a dedicated to making Veeam backups which automatically run every night). The Veeam software does not have to run in a Virtual Machine, although it is easier that way, you can easily install it on any Desktop with LAN access
Veeam also has a pretty neat system for backing up Windows computers using a USB Drive. I have played around with it a bit, but that is why I have Server 2102 r2 Essentials installed so I never really got into it.
Veeam Community Edition
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Veeam Windows Agent
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I'm new to Blue Iris so hopefully my new servers have enough horsepower. Right now I have two 2MP cameras and my CPU is at 5% with Quicksync enabled. Before iGPU passthrough, my CPU was about 10%. I will probably add another 6 cameras.
I also have pfSense and Plex and some other work related VMs. I'll check out HomeSeer3 and Veeam. Someone also suggested that I try Rubric. Any experience there? Thanks!
