seeking advice for NVR server

[politby]

hello everyone,

First post, just registered, being a complete newbie to surveillance cameras.

I have just purchased 4 Hikvision 3MP cameras to be installed around my house. These four will cover all areas required so I do not anticipate needing any more cameras in the foreseeable future.

I would also like to avoid having to buy dedicated recording hardware, hoping that I will be able to use one of my existing servers to run an NVR.

Here is a diagram of my little home network:



I have two options: either I use the Windows 2012 server, this is currently my domain and media server. It has plenty of storage available (runs Flexraid for redundancy) and I can easily add a couple more dedicated hard drives for recording. It's only got 8 gigs of RAM, however, and a cheap Pentium processor.

Or, and this is what I would prefer, I use a virtual machine in my VMware host to run the NVR. This is not exactly a beast of a machine either - 2x Opteron dual-core 2.6 GHz processors and 16 gigs of RAM - but it has 6 network cards so I can dedicate at least 2 to the NVR VM. It only has limited local storage so I would have to have the NVR to record to a network share on the other server.

I think I have narrowed down the choice of software to either the free edition of XProtect or the free one from Hikvision. I made a test installation of Blue Iris but I didn't like the interface at all.

I would very much appreciate your comments on whether my thinking is realistic. Will this work?

In case I need a fallback plan, I guess I could stretch the budget to make room for one of those $100 4-channel Hikvision NVRs off Aliexpress. Those that nobody seems to know anything about.

Edit: forgot to say I don't plan on continuous recording, only when detecting motion.

 

[fenderman]

Welcome to the forum, if you are looking for cheap or free, your setup will only be able to handle hikvision or xprotect free..go with hikvision unless the storage limitation on xprotect does not bother you...

 

[icerabbit]

How many virtual machines can the system handle?

As I think using a virtual machine to run surveillance software would just be unnecessary overhead, and depending on which surveillance software you decide on and which detection methods you want or need, cpu cycles are all it needs and always in short supply.

And, Pentium does not ring a bell to me for fast, even though intel is still releasing them on newer hardware.

The cheapest (free) and least resource intensive option to get you started is to install Hikvision iVMS 4200 on a system + use in camera motion detection + dedicated a hard drive for storage. No limitation on number of cameras / storage days / size of the storage / ... Note: I have not used xprotect.

You don't need 2 or 4 or 6 ethernet ports, because the recording load per camera probably will be around or a bit above 1MB/s depending on 3mp / 2mp and fps bandwidth etc settings. With 6x 1920x1080 20fps above average quality I see about 4MB/s for all six. So, anything you do with four will be well within ordinary ethernet load.

 

[politby]

Thanks.

I think what I have trouble understanding is the need for all these CPU cycles. If the cameras do all encoding and motion detection, what is there to do for the server other than dump the streams to disk?

Analogy: my Pentium based media server has 6 DVB-S2 satellite tuners. On occasion I will have 6 simultaneous recordings in progress. The server picks up these six ~8-14 Mbit/s H.264 1080i streams, decrypts them using keys retrieved from a smart card, and dumps them to disk. It does this at no more than 45% CPU load, the majority caused by the decryption software.

Let's say 10 Mbit/s average per channel, that's 60 Mbit/s or 7.5 MB/s compared to a worst case of 4 MB/s from the cameras.

Why should an NVR need any more processing power when there is no decryption needed?

 

[icerabbit]

You are correct, that if you can leverage in-camera, all it needs to do is write the streams. Recording with in-camera is nominal on a core i3 i5 system.

Sorry for the confusion, when I was speaking in general, that most of the software will not do in-camera motion detection, so then the CPU does motion detection by analyzing frame by frame what is going on. Depending on the CPU and cameras it'll take 5-10-20% CPU per HD stream to do motion analysis.

But I'm curious about the extra VM. Is it for security and to separate out the tasks in their own stable environment?
What is the load by running another VM? On top of the other stuff that it is already doing?

But anyway. On a budget, I think your best bet is to try iVMS because it is free, no fees, and you can leverage in-camera detection.

 

[politby]

There's very little overhead when running in a VM as opposed to native. The ESXi hypervisor is very efficient.

Currently there are 3 VMs running on the host; the Server 2012 for the NVR and two Linux VMs running a UTM and a mail server, respectively. None of the Linux VMs are particularly resource intensive so I can allocate four cores to the NVR.

Anyway with my modest setup the Hikvision software is likely to do just fine.