Running BI in a VM? How can I maximize BI performance?

[dannieboiz]

Working on a replacement BI server and was thinking about using VM hosted on Server 2012.

Was thinking, install Windows 10 on VM for BI and HomeSeer. I like this idea because the ability to create clones and the ability to bring the system back quickly.

Will this reduce the HP required to run BI in a VM? I have ten 3mp HIKVision at the moment and once complete I'll have 12 total.

At the moment, I'm thinking an I7-4790 or 6700, 16gb RAM

Is it a good idea to use a VM or should I just stick with everything on the main OS and do Bare metal backups?

 

[nayr]

Ive considered this, but BlueIris does alot with hardware acceleration that wont be avilable to a VM.. your big i74790 with 16GB ram wont look like much more hardware than an old Pentium 4 era cpu to the VM for as far as h264 hardware acceleration and the likes are concerned.

then you have storage requirements, storing to a Virtual disk is just stupid for this much data (filesystems ontop of filesystems ontop of filesystems, ugh) so you have to offload that to a fileserver and well shux.. quality bare metal whops its ass.. in both power efficiency and performance.

Running BI in a VM, via car analogy would be like buying a Tesla and then installing a gas engine in it... wait whaaa?

 

[dannieboiz]

Ive considered this, but BlueIris does alot with hardware acceleration that wont be avilable to a VM.. your big i74790 with 16GB ram wont look like much more hardware than an old Pentium 4 era cpu to the VM for as far as h264 hardware acceleration and the likes are concerned.

then you have storage requirements, storing to a Virtual disk is just stupid for this much data (filesystems ontop of filesystems ontop of filesystems, ugh) so you have to offload that to a fileserver and well shux.. quality bare metal whops its ass.. in both power efficiency and performance.

car analogy would be buying a Tesla and then installing a gas engine in it.

thanks that was the exact answer I was looking for...

At the moment, my BI records direct to a 2tb disk then upload it to my NAS for storage. I think I'll just do a single server 2012 server with everything and do nightly imaging.

 

[nayr]

The VM Tradeoff is more for mission critical applications that not simply require high availability, but demand it.. I work on cloud backends and everything runs virtualized and everything is insanely fault tolerant, but I can tell you that if you dont do it right its not worth doing.. so unless your willing to have 2 very overpowered and inefficient host machines connected together with some fiber-optics and shared storage so you can live migrate and recover automatically after hardware failures.. its all just academic, your upping the complexity massively trying to reduce failures.. the engineering is very serious and the compromises required are unreasonable for most applications.

depending on the size of your image and the importance of the data might determine if backing up is valued, I do not backup my NVR data, or any servers beyond configs really.. for me Uptime > Integrity, I can reinstall from scratch, restore my configs from git and be back up and running in a few mins where a restore will churn away for hours/days.. I have enough spare hardware to help me ride out outages, I could spin it up on any number of machines.