Blue Iris in VMWare ESXi 6.7 with passthrough of Intel integrated graphics

Right. There's nothing inherently unstable about running Blue Iris or any other VMS (video management system) in a VM (virtual machine). You just need to understand that you are adding a layer of complexity and overhead, and understand that certain issues may arise from that.
 
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wpiman said:
... Anyways, I installed an E3-1245 this morning and will work on the pass through. Thanks again. Good topic for discussion.
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Please post your findings when you get a chance. One thing I really like about Virtual Machines is that they don't take the entire system down when they hang.

FYI, I am not promoting and not affiliated with the product/company below; just sharing my experience.

I use Macrium Reflect for disk imaging / backup of Windows drive. They have a Free version for home / business use.
Tested this product and it has not failed me in either backup or restore functions. Just save backup(s) to another HDD and you should be fine. Before backup, I stop recording and stop BI service, start imaging process and when completed, go back to business as usual.

Once you create a bootable USB with their ISO, restoring is super easy.
 
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bp2008 said:
Why stop BI before making a backup?
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I suppose it wouldn't make a difference (haven't tested it). It is probably more of a habit than anything else. I just stop BI as it is the only service running i.e. processing, storing database on the main SSD which is being imaged.. and .. also camera feed -but that's on another drive so that shouldn't matter.

It is possible that imaging software now is more mature than the olden days of Active DiskImage or Acronis etc., tools and you probably don't need to. I want to avoid any corruption of BI database (although it is not that difficult to rebuild/repair it either)..

so, in a nutshell, Old habit. :lol:
 
Well you do have a point. There is a chance, however small, that BI's clip database may be snapshotted for backup while it is in the middle of a commit operation, and that BI might not be able to gracefully recover it from that state. Popular database formats are designed to handle such situations without issue, but I suspect BI uses its own proprietary format.
 
bp2008 said:
Well you do have a point. There is a chance, however small, that BI's clip database may be snapshotted for backup while it is in the middle of a commit operation, and that BI might not be able to gracefully recover it from that state. Popular database formats are designed to handle such situations without issue, but I suspect BI uses its own proprietary format.
Click to expand...
Exactly.. and you are forgetting the probable OCD factor on my part in there as well. :). IMHO, if there are any critical clips to be saved, they should be exported out to another location and stored there. In the event the database gets corrupted, as it happened once when I was randomly deleting recordings etc., to test the software in the beginning, rebuilding DB failed to get everything back to 100%. Then I simply stopped BI, deleted all recordings, DB and restarted BI to start fresh. Point is that the BI didn't freak out and go nuts on me. It just picked up and started right back.

No big deal.
 
I use Macrium Reflect, as well, to keep a bootable clone of my boot drive. I also shut down BI when running the clone. OCD here as well.
 
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I have paid Macrium Reflect licenses and make daily incremental backups of my boot disk. If any one of the backup dates happens to have a corrupt file, the next or previous one most likely will be fine :)
 
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Ok, so I updated to the E1245-V3 and I wasn't seeing the intel graphics show up on the pass through. After so futzing around for a bit, I think I figured out why. My motherboard has a C224 chipset which does not support the integrated graphics. So the processor upgrade seems to have been all for naught. I could upgrade the motherboard but if I am going to do that; I am going to go more modern.

That said, going through the process made me look at my BI setup more closely. One of the new cameras didn't have direct to disk writing, and I shut off windows auto updates (I had it set to just download them, but the check alone used much CPU) and defender. These would spike the processor, and now I will just do it manually periodically.

I also wasn't using VT-d for the VM and I turned that on.

Doing this, BI is now idling around 13%; and Homeseer and windows processes bring this up to maybe 20% of the 2 cores I allotted to it.

I have the two other cores dedicated to a Linux VM which is running Plex. My load there is quite lite; so I could also allocate another core to the Windows VM after I do some more experimentation there.

I am also storing all VMs on my 18 drive CentOS RAID 5 NAS; and I am using the NAS to store the video. So far, no problems there. I also might use the local HD to store the video (I have a 2 terabyte RAID 0 config on the ESXi box which was my former datastore).

Long story short; I think I can comfortable add some more load to my BI setup before I need to upgrade.
 
How do you have an 18 drive RAID 5? More importantly, why would you put your data at risk like that? RAID 0 is also not a good idea for data you care about.
 
bp2008 said:
How do you have an 18 drive RAID 5? More importantly, why would you put your data at risk like that? RAID 0 is also not a good idea for data you care about.
Click to expand...

Looks like it is actually a RAID 6 (z2) striped across 3 volumes (RAID 60). Set it up a while ago (my old one was a 5).

I run crashplan on it as well. A NAS is not a backup.

-------------------------------------
[wpiman@nas ~]$ zpool status
pool: tank
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub repaired 0B in 2h27m with 0 errors on Mon Apr 1 04:27:44 2019
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
tank ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz2-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_DT01ACA300_23D3JZUAS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_HDWD130_461ZGR8GS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_DT01ACA300_23DER83GS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_HDWD130_4620K40GS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_DT01ACA300_83O2GRAKS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_HDWD130_46209S9GS ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz2-1 ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_DT01ACA300_83O2GRYKS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_HDWD130_46209RZGS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_DT01ACA300_83O2GSLKS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_HDWD130_85DATG5GS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_DT01ACA300_83O2GTBKS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_HDWD130_4620JUNGS ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz2-2 ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_DT01ACA300_83O2JLNKS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_HDWD130_85EB6W3GS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_DT01ACA300_93H57EJKS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_HDWD130_461Z9GRGS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_DT01ACA300_Y44TZPWGS ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-TOSHIBA_HDWD130_85EB6W7GS ONLINE 0 0 0
logs
mirror-3 ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-INTEL_SSDSC2BA100G3_BTTV4222016H100FGN-part1 ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-INTEL_SSDSC2BA100G3_BTTV422203UF100FGN-part1 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
 
wpiman said:
Ok, so I updated to the E1245-V3 and I wasn't seeing the intel graphics show up on the pass through. After so futzing around for a bit, I think I figured out why. My motherboard has a C224 chipset which does not support the integrated graphics. So the processor upgrade seems to have been all for naught. ...
Click to expand...

That sucks.. it would be great if your motherboard supported it and I could've asked you more questions... :) OTH, you might be able to pick up a compatible board for little money given that the CPU is relatively old... just saying... :) Another thing to think about (which I haven't researched) is if BI uses newer instruction set (Intel Video I mean) and the older CPUs while they may work, may not be efficient. Anyway, good to see the progress you made!
 
myipcam said:
That sucks.. it would be great if your motherboard supported it and I could've asked you more questions... :) OTH, you might be able to pick up a compatible board for little money given that the CPU is relatively old... just saying... :) Another thing to think about (which I haven't researched) is if BI uses newer instruction set (Intel Video I mean) and the older CPUs while they may work, may not be efficient. Anyway, good to see the progress you made!
Click to expand...

Was going to do a new build but I figured I’d try the C226 motherboard to see if it fixes these issues. I’ll follow up.
 
So I tried the C226 motherboard and tried to do the pass through. For some reason, ESXi wouldn't boot windows with the bypass--- ended up just putting Windows 10 Pro on the machine. Am running it unregistered-- it is headless so I am not even sure if it matters.
 
i am using i7-8650U with h620 GPU integrated

while passthrough the GPU to a vm windows 10

then added the two Parameters

How can I connect to the vm via the VGA interface comes from the motherboard？

When I connected the display with the motherboard vga interface, the display shows nothing.

thanks for any help.
 
sealionking said:
i am using i7-8650U with h620 GPU integrated

while passthrough the GPU to a vm windows 10

then added the two Parameters

How can I connect to the vm via the VGA interface comes from the motherboard？

When I connected the display with the motherboard vga interface, the display shows nothing.

thanks for any help.
Click to expand...
I believe the monitor that is connected to your ESXi host will not show anything if you enabled GPU passthrough.
 
I just got iGPU passthrough to work on my BI5 VM and wanted to share for the greater good. I basically followed the OP instructions but it didn't work with pciHole.start = 2048.

Here are the details:
Host CPU: Xeon E-2224G with Intel UHD P630
Hypervisor: ESXi 6.7U3b (build 15160138)
Guest OS: Windows 10 Pro N build 1909. 2 cores @3.50GHz and 8GB ram
VM Advanced option: hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE and svga.present = FALSE

The main hiccup for me was "hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE". I needed this in there or I would get the dreaded "Code 43" error.

pciHole.start = 2048 (still got code 43 error so I removed this line. does not seem to do anything in my case)
 
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. I should add that the database is on a separate virtual drive in datastore 1 (SSD) along with the 'new clips' storage. (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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