Blue Iris on Proxmox Hardware Specs Questions

IronSheepdog

IronSheepdog

n3wb
Feb 28, 2022
10
3
Snyder County, Pennsylvania
I hope I have the right section of this forum for this question. I posted it on Blue Iris' forum, but someone suggested I try the "other forum". I'm guessing they mean this one? Anyway... Right now, I have Blue Iris and Deepstack running on an Intel NUC 8 with a Core-i7 8650U with 8GB of RAM. I don't have any issues with it at all. It rarely uses the full CPU or RAM. I have eight cameras, currently.

I also have a small server I built myself running an Intel Xeon E-2146G with 32GB of RAM with four 4TB WD red drives in a Raid Z2 array. Right now, I am running TrueNAS Core with jails of Plex and Nextcloud as well as a VM of Ubuntu. I am thinking about, instead, running Proxmox VM and virtualizing TrueNAS Scale. Basically, I'd like to run Proxmox on my server with TrueNAS Scale virtualized as well as an instance of Plex and Nextcloud. I'd also like to run Windows 10 virtualized and dedicate that solely to Blue Iris.

As of right now, my TrueNAS Core build rarely uses even half of the RAM installed and I hardly ever see the CPU usage go above 10% when idle. When Plex is in use, I rarely see it go above 30%.

What are everyone's thoughts on running Blue Iris on a VM in Proxmox with the hardware that I have and the other software that I want to install? I have everything backed up so I can wipe the pool out if I need to. I just hate to go this route and start over and have it not work well.
 
Assuming you have another use for the NUC after moving Blue Iris off, then I think you'd be fine moving Blue Iris to a VM on the Xeon. You will lose the ability to use hardware acceleration from the Intel graphics, but if you're using sub streams on all the cameras, that won't matter much anyway. I would start by assigning 6 cores to the Blue Iris VM and adjust from there as needed. You might even run Deepstack in a separate VM or container from Blue Iris so that a surge in Deepstack's resource usage won't starve the Blue Iris process of its own CPU time. Then you won't need to assign as many resources to the Blue Iris VM.
 
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bp2008 said:
Assuming you have another use for the NUC after moving Blue Iris off, then I think you'd be fine moving Blue Iris to a VM on the Xeon. You will lose the ability to use hardware acceleration from the Intel graphics, but if you're using sub streams on all the cameras, that won't matter much anyway. I would start by assigning 6 cores to the Blue Iris VM and adjust from there as needed. You might even run Deepstack in a separate VM or container from Blue Iris so that a surge in Deepstack's resource usage won't starve the Blue Iris process of its own CPU time. Then you won't need to assign as many resources to the Blue Iris VM.
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That's good to hear. I will say that I did install Windows 10 in a VM in TrueNAS Core. It seriously sucks the resources like crazy (100% CPU). However, I did read from others that Windows 10 on a VM in TrueNAS is not a good idea because it really drains the resources for some reason. I take it Windows 10 on Proxmox isn't as bad?
Note: This is why I'm asking the whole question. I see how Windows 10 ruins my TrueNAS machine. I just worry what it'll do on Proxmox.
 
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I manage a proxmox server at work with lots of windows 10 and server 2019 VMs, and haven't had any major issues like that. One of the Win10 VMs even runs a copy of Blue Iris, but it is just for one camera that nobody ever looks at, so I have the "Limit decoding unless required" function enabled and it basically idles at a small fraction of one core usage.
 
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How did this work for you? I'm considering either building a 2U chassis that is dedicated Windows 10 and Blue Iris or building a 3U or 4U chassis for Proxmox and having a Windows 10 VM with BI installed. I have about 3-4 cameras. What hardware you ask? I'm not sure yet for the Proxmox setup. Latest i7 most likely with the most cores I can afford at that time.
 
Jake1979 said:
How did this work for you? I'm considering either building a 2U chassis that is dedicated Windows 10 and Blue Iris or building a 3U or 4U chassis for Proxmox and having a Windows 10 VM with BI installed. I have about 3-4 cameras. What hardware you ask? I'm not sure yet for the Proxmox setup. Latest i7 most likely with the most cores I can afford at that time.
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So, I ended up purchasing a used Dell PowerEdge R720 running two Xeon E5-2680 v2 CPUs and 64GB of RAM and using that as my primary Proxmox server. For what I use it for, it works well. However, even with the dual CPU's, they are too old to handle Blue Iris. What I did was move the four 4TB WD red drives from the TrueNAS server to the PowerEdge. I then purchased a WD 2TB purple drive and installed it in the "TrueNAS" sever. I then wiped TrueNAS and installed Proxmox to make it a second Proxmox server. I then installed a Windows 10 VM and put Blue Iris on that. It works great. The Xeon E-2146G can handle Blue Iris with nine cameras with no problems at all. One of the RAM chips failed and I'm down to 16GB and it is still running smoothly.
 
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I'm looking at building a new Proxmox as mentioned, would Intel i9 or i7 with the max cores be suitable for ProxMox and BlueIris? I do plan on using ProxMox for other things as well.
 
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Jake1979 said:
I'm looking at building a new Proxmox as mentioned, would Intel i9 or i7 with the max cores be suitable for ProxMox and BlueIris? I do plan on using ProxMox for other things as well.
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Either will work great. The Intel Xeon E-2146G has 6 cores/12 threads and built in video. I would make sure whichever processor you go with, try to keep it at least 8th gen or later. Before moving Blue Iris to a VM, I had it running on an Intel NUC 8 running an Intel Core i7 8650U with 4 cores/8 threads and it was handling things just fine.
 
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I run BI in a VM on Proxmox
I went with a Dell SFF which has a i5-8500 in it (Also have a little SFF Nvida GPU passed through to BI for hardware accel + DeepStack)
Frigate runs in Proxmox as well with a coral TPU in a M2 slot, as well as some other VM's/Containers

All runs great with no issues :)
 
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I have a similar setup, works just fine without a gpu and 12 cameras. There is 2-3 secondy delay in the telegram notification (aitool) compared with a gpu setup, thats good enough for my needs.

My setup is only a i3 9300 and it handles all other vm´s in my home as well (smarthome, pihole, nas services,...)
 
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I've been contemplating installing proxmox on my windows pc for a while as I have proxmox on 2 other small pc's and love it.

Only used for Blue Iris 9 cams, all substreams low res, plus Deepstack GPU and AI Tool.

My windows 10 pc has a ryzen 5 3400g, 16gb ram, 1tb SSD, 4tb HDD,
GPU GTX970
motherboard ECS A320AM4-M3D

Would I encounter any issues with wiping windows and installing proxmox with GPU passthrough for deepstack?

Thanks
 
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I use GPU pass through Nvidia 1050 I think it is, and it works no problem for me
Had to be a specific card to fit into my SFF case
 
I will try and set up a dual boot on my amd windows to test.
dual boot with debian - install proxmox on the debian and test the gpu passthrough. Still keeping my original windows on the main ssd partition which is luckily partitioned already into 2 x 500gb.

update: dual boot set up with debian on 1 and windows on the other. set the grub order to start on windows for now
 
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wrcvr4 said:
I use GPU pass through Nvidia 1050 I think it is, and it works no problem for me
Had to be a specific card to fit into my SFF case
Click to expand...
Got the proxmox windows vm up and running with AI and deepstack. Still having issues with gpu passthrough. In the vm hardware options set up I could select my gtx970 as the GPU so it is viewing it at least.
logs in AITOOL keep saying 0 out 1 python process running and erroring out. Could be a cudnn/cuda set up issue though.
What steps did you follow to passthrough?


1659647093592.png1659647093592.png
 
Messed it up somehow. Windows vm was freezing using up all the memory I assigned. Lost access to the debían gui and grub stopped showing the 2 operating systems even though the config looked all good .
Removed the grub entry for debian and deleted the volume. Will try again another day
 
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