Dahua NVR Multiple IP Cameras on POE Switch on POE Switchport

kolbep

n3wb
Aug 4, 2021
5
0
South Africa
Good Day
Typing this from memory, as I have not worked at this site for a while, but need to go back there soon.

My client has a Dahua DHI-NVR5232-16P-4KS2 NVR, with several Dahua IP Cameras.

The NVR is locked away in an office at a far end of the building (for physical access security and monitoring). Which means that :

1) Either each camera needs to homerun back to its own POE port on the NVR (Which means a lot of cabling distance)
or
2) There is a seperate POE Switch installed closer to the cameras, and then the Uplink port for this switch joins into the LAN (Non POE) side of the NVR, and the cameras get set addresses on the LAN SIde (Tried this, but running several cameras through the 100Mbps LAN port seems to slow the camera througputs down - I believe it caused intermittent dropouts of the cameras).
or
3) Install 3 or 4 seperate 4 PORT POE Switches at each cluster of cameras. Then have the uplink ports of those POE Switches each have a homerun back to a POE Port on the NVR.

I prefer method 3 (See my below ideal representation), as it limits the traffic on the LAN segment, puts all the cameras into their own subnet (the one created by the switch network in the Dahua NVR), and a lot less cabling.
But when I have tried method 3 before, it does not seem to be stable. Sometimes I will need to powercycle the cameras one-by-one, eventually the NVR picks them all up. But then if something happens, like the NVR Restarts, or anything really, cameras tend to drop off. I don't know if it is because the NVR only wants to assign 1 IP Address for a device on each of it's POE ports, or what the problem could be.

Any suggestions in this case...

Thank you
Peter

Code:
LAN/INTERNET ROUTER  ------------------------------> NVR LAN PORT

CAM1 ------> SEPERATE POE SWITCH1 PORT1
CAM2 ------> SEPERATE POE SWITCH1 PORT2
CAM3 ------> SEPERATE POE SWITCH1 PORT3
CAM4 ------> SEPERATE POE SWITCH1 PORT4
             SEPERATE POE SWITCH1 UPLINK PORT ---------> NVR POE PORT 1

CAM5 ------> SEPERATE POE SWITCH2 PORT1
CAM6 ------> SEPERATE POE SWITCH2 PORT2
CAM7 ------> SEPERATE POE SWITCH2 PORT3
CAM8 ------> SEPERATE POE SWITCH2 PORT4
             SEPERATE POE SWITCH2 UPLINK PORT ---------> NVR POE PORT 2

CAM9 ----------------------------------------------------> NVR POE PORT 3
CAM10 --------------------------------------------------> NVR POE PORT 4

[code]
 
On most NVRs you can not plug Switches into the POE ports. The POE port supports one and only one camera. But you can plug the switches into the network ethernet port on the NVR and manually configure the cameras in the NVR. The cameras will be on your normal home network with normal network IP address. Set each camera to a static IP address.

I would add a 4 port switch , to plug The NVR, the home network, and the Two POE switches into
 
SouthernYankee - Thank you, that is in line with my findings
cbt20 - Didn't even think of that. It was a takeover Job, and they only had FastEthernet switches in place. Didn't even think to check if the NVR had a gigabit Ethernet. I will continue with Option 2, but add a few gigabit switches.

P