Blue Iris Server Advice

[venno]

Hi All

I recently put a 6 cam (Dahua 4631 non-china) system into my house and hooked them up to a Dahua single HDD 8 port POE NVR. After struggling to get the system to do what I want, I have ditched the NVR.

I decided to go with a software solution and purchased Blue Iris and a Unifi 8 port POE switch, I have an all Unifi home network so it will be easy to integrate.

I have been looking at options to run BI and was initially going to run it as a VM (I have an extensive prosumer ESXi multi server and NAS setup) but I started to worry about the network traffic impact potential and also the storage access requirements (I would have to use iSCSI to the NAS). One of the reasons I initially went for the NVR was traffic segregation and storage provisioning.

I have a retired HP G8 microserver that used to be my main ESXi server; it has a full iLO license, 16GB ram, a quad core HT E3-1260L cpu, 240GB SSD boot drive and 2 x WD Red 2TB HDD. I was thinking I could repurpose this to run BI, it has a spare internal PCI slot that I could fit a graphics card if need be.

Would this be suitable?

 

[bp2008]

That old box should be fine. It is a low power model (2.4 GHz base frequency, 45 W TDP) but it at least is quad core with hyperthreading. If the CPU usage is too high, you can always upgrade to something newer. You won't need a graphics card unless you intend to connect a 4K display to that machine for Blue Iris's local console.

If you run Windows on the bare metal (as I would recommend), you can use Quick Sync for hardware acceleration of H.264 decoding. However in my experience, the Quick Sync implementation in Sandy Bridge / HD 2000 graphics can't process video higher than 1920x1080 resolution. So you might be stuck with software decoding anyway.

 

[venno]

Cheers, good that I don't need a graphics card, I didn't know if it needed one fore remote rendering in HD.

I will only be accessing headless via web browser/app so I hope 1080p will be ok and then I can do a bare metal win7 install (have a spare pro license), otherwise I may put ESXi on it and run as VM (have spare licenses for this too).