Moved my Blue Iris from hardware to VM to save power.

skywise

skywise

Young grasshopper
May 12, 2015
46
4
Winnipeg
I've been working on reworking my systems in the home with one goal to maybe move my current BI system to a VM.
My current BI setup was getting a bit CPU starved, hitting 100% from time to time.
I run a rather beefy server in the house anyway as my NAS/VM server so moving it wouldn't involve any added cost.
My BI consists of:
a AMD X6 1090T PC with 8G of RAM and a spinner HD.
I'm running 10 PoE cameras, mostly 720P, all cheap.
The AMD system consumes about 170 watts with BI rendering on the main display.

When I moved it to the VM, I gave it 16G of RAM, 12 vCPU, and 500G of iSCSI drive.
The VM server is running AMD Opteron 6378 CPUs and ESXi 6.7.
I copied c:\blueiris, exported the settings Reg and installed BI new from DL.
The new VM BI stays below 50%CPU and consumes around 35 watts over what the VM server consumes idling.
The main BI screen is kept minimized to avoid the need to render since no-one looks at the main console anymore.
The main screen for BI now is a Chromebox (Asus) and the UI3 web interface.

Hope this was interesting to some, it was certainly fun to setup.
 
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skywise said:
I've been working on reworking my systems in the home with one goal to maybe move my current BI system to a VM.
My current BI setup was getting a bit CPU starved, hitting 100% from time to time.
I run a rather beefy server in the house anyway as my NAS/VM server so moving it wouldn't involve any added cost.
My BI consists of:
a AMD X6 1090T PC with 8G of RAM and a spinner HD.
I'm running 10 PoE cameras, mostly 720P, all cheap.
The AMD system consumes about 170 watts with BI rendering on the main display.

When I moved it to the VM, I gave it 16G of RAM, 12 vCPU, and 500G of iSCSI drive.
The VM server is running AMD Opteron 6378 CPUs and ESXi 6.7.
I copied c:\blueiris, exported the settings Reg and installed BI new from DL.
The new VM BI stays below 50%CPU and consumes around 35 watts over what the VM server consumes idling.
The main BI screen is kept minimized to avoid the need to render since no-one looks at the main console anymore.
The main screen for BI now is a Chromebox (Asus) and the UI3 web interface.

Hope this was interesting to some, it was certainly fun to setup.
Click to expand...
a 100 dollar i5-3570 would consume less than 35w at that load and you would have a dedicated machine for BI.
You should replace your amd system totally with another i5-3570 based system..it would pay for itself in less than a year.
 
<35 watts including HD? (and a 500G SSD would be way over $100)
My current system is using ~100G of RAM and a total of 15TB of disk. (It's Home Automation, 4k transcoding media server, backup for all the laptops/desktops in the house) I'm a bit of an edge case. :)
 
skywise said:
<35 watts including HD? (and a 500G SSD would be way over $100)
My current system is using ~100G of RAM and a total of 15TB of disk. (It's Home Automation, 4k transcoding media server, backup for all the laptops/desktops in the house) I'm a bit of an edge case. :)
Click to expand...
yes including hard drive... why would you use an ssd to record video?
is your current system running 24/7 ?....not sure why you need 100g of ram to transcode video...seems like a waste of time and money.
 
The VM system is running 24/7 since it's both NAS for the house, the home automation system, and the media server. (and backup server for pretty much everything)
ZFS is quite RAM hungry, recommended is 1GB of RAM per TB of disk. Also, that RAM should be ECC to prevent errors from creeping into the data stored on the drive. Multiple streams of video require a fair bit of RAM/CPU to process. Easy if the show is 4k and the TV is 4K but transcoding required on the fly if the TV is 1080P or an iPad or iPhone.
I only brought up the SSD because spinners tend to use more power, a 500G spinning drive takes 6.5watts in use so we're down to <30 watts for everything else in the system, loaded with multiple streams playing.
 
For what its worth my FreeNAS box is perfectly happy to run 11x 6TB disks with just 32 GB of RAM and would probably be fine on less. I'm not letting it run deduplication though, maybe you are.

That is a rather unusual choice of CPU. I didn't find any trustworthy benchmarks of it but given that they are pre-ryzen AMD chips they are probably quite inefficient.
 
Price was the big factor there.
RAM was free from a salvaged server and the CPUs were $100 each, MB was only $100 as well.
 
Not 35 watts, that's for sure. :)
Around 170 at idle. The over the top RAM adds something like 10-20 watts but I figured bragging rights outweighed cost. :)
 
There is hardware accelerated transcoding available for newer Intel CPUs depending on how you are playing out to the devices that need it. Might be worth exploring if/when you think about upgrading. Between HW acceleration on that and BI, you could potentially scale down the CPU specs quite a bit. Of course, I'm running BI as a VM in a power chugging server so who am I to say :idk:
 
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