Tesla K80 inside a Dell R730 for BlueIris NVidia acceleration

[deekaph]

Hi guys, I've lurked here a bit while I got my server up and running but posting for the first time because I can't seem to find a definitive answer.

I've got a Dell Poweredge R730 (dual E5-2680v4's, 128GB) running my home lab which gives me plenty of resources however I've been perving on the Tesla K80s as they're become so incredibly cheap - almost 5000 CUDA cores, 24GB RAM, under $200, I almost want to buy it just because it's such a beast for so cheap.

The question is, has anyone here done this, specifically along the same kind of setup I have? Looking for a definitive answer before I blow more money on tech that just isn't going to work. I know from the Dell parts list that the Tesla is supported, but the question is whether or not BlueIris will make use of it as opposed to a desktop/"gaming" card.

I'm running UNRaid with BlueIris inside a Win10 VM, I'm thinking to passthrough the GPU and just let blueiris have it all to itself. Presently Deepstack is running on its own docker container in the main hypervisor but it doesn't seem to do much so if this idea is viable I'll throw docker into the blueiris guest so it can taste the tesla as well.

Thanks in advance

 

[Flintstone61]

Be interesting to see the answer!

 

[mewop]

Please keep us updated!

 

[birdie]

Have you tried this yet? I'm interested in doing the same sort of thing.

 

[DG99]

The problems you will have with the Xeon is there is no intel GPU on the chip, dell used 2 MB maxtor video chip on Xeon systems.
You will need to do GPU passthrough, video will still be choppy from my experience. Have a few R720 & R730 in esxi. My esxi I9 11900K blows away and of my dual Xeon server for Blueiris.

 

[deekaph]

Have you tried this yet? I'm interested in doing the same sort of thing.

Please keep us updated!

Be interesting to see the answer!

Hey folks so yes I did end up doing it, my R730 runs ESXi 7 now instead of unraid and it does indeed run but with a few caveats:

1. The Tesla K80 is actually essentially x2 12GB 2500 CUDA core cards bolted together not one single 24GB 5000 core card. It actually shows up in ESXi as two separate cards that you can provision to separate VMs, which is cool for virtualization but it also means that at most Blue Iris can use 2500 cores, not 5000, which significantly diminishes the value proposition.

2. The provisioning of the card to the Blue Iris VM did indeed improve performance, I've had it running now for several months and it's passable but certainly not ideal. I've got a Plex server running on the same VM but even with Plex idle and just the cameras and deep stack running the CPU averages around 60-80% and if somebody walks around the house and triggers a bunch of events it pins the CPU instantly. There are x8 cameras at 4k. I did try just shoveling resources at it, like "ok you're resource hungry? How about 96GB of DDR4 and 50 CPU cores!?" Almost no effect. I've got it "balanced" now and the sweet spot with this setup seems to be 16 cores and 32gb of RAM.

3. Blue Iris (and possibly deep stack) don't play well with other AI, I was doing some experimenting with Stable Diffusion (an AI text to image generation platform) and put it on the same VM as BI and DS since it had the K80 provisioned to it. Amazing results with that software BTW but after twice waking up to find some servers inaccessible then going down to the basement where my server rack is to find the whole R730 had PSOD (purple screen of death, ESXi equivalent of BDOD) resulting from something awful having to do with that VM and the K80 card,I removed the competing AI software and no more crashes.

4. After installing the K80 the server went from being relatively quiet most of the time significantly louder. I knew it would happen as the K80 is passively cooled (has no fans of its own) and relies instead on being in-line with the airflow path from the CPUs out the back of the unit. But holy cow it's a lot louder, so much so thatI had to move my entire server rack to another part of the house (the basement) because whereas before it had made some noise but was passable, following the K80 install it was insufferable. Even now you can hear it whining from across the house and behind a door.

The problems you will have with the Xeon is there is no intel GPU on the chip, dell used 2 MB maxtor video chip on Xeon systems.
You will need to do GPU passthrough, video will still be choppy from my experience. Have a few R720 & R730 in esxi. My esxi I9 11900K blows away and of my dual Xeon server for Blueiris.

This is the conclusion I've come to as well. I picked up a separate rack mountable computer Case and am presently on the lookout for a newer generation Intel chip/mono combo. Prefer not to buy new, so I'm just watching the marketplace ads for something probably 7th Gen or better to come up for cheap. Question for you sir: how much Ram did you feed it and for how many cameras? And did you give it a GPU at all? I currently have 8x 4k cameras but would like to eventually double that number. I'm thinking with a newer generation cpu 16gb should be fine.

So that's my plan and the conclusion of that research! My R730 continues to run Blue Iris until I get a separate box with a desktop Intel chip going for it at which time my R730 will go back to just lab use.

I hope this helps others who've considered this setup.

 

[Video1]

Hey folks so yes I did end up doing it, my R730 runs ESXi 7 now instead of unraid and it does indeed run but with a few caveats:

1. The Tesla K80 is actually essentially x2 12GB 2500 CUDA core cards bolted together not one single 24GB 5000 core card. It actually shows up in ESXi as two separate cards that you can provision to separate VMs, which is cool for virtualization but it also means that at most Blue Iris can use 2500 cores, not 5000, which significantly diminishes the value proposition.

2. The provisioning of the card to the Blue Iris VM did indeed improve performance, I've had it running now for several months and it's passable but certainly not ideal. I've got a Plex server running on the same VM but even with Plex idle and just the cameras and deep stack running the CPU averages around 60-80% and if somebody walks around the house and triggers a bunch of events it pins the CPU instantly. There are x8 cameras at 4k. I did try just shoveling resources at it, like "ok you're resource hungry? How about 96GB of DDR4 and 50 CPU cores!?" Almost no effect. I've got it "balanced" now and the sweet spot with this setup seems to be 16 cores and 32gb of RAM.

3. Blue Iris (and possibly deep stack) don't play well with other AI, I was doing some experimenting with Stable Diffusion (an AI text to image generation platform) and put it on the same VM as BI and DS since it had the K80 provisioned to it. Amazing results with that software BTW but after twice waking up to find some servers inaccessible then going down to the basement where my server rack is to find the whole R730 had PSOD (purple screen of death, ESXi equivalent of BDOD) resulting from something awful having to do with that VM and the K80 card,I removed the competing AI software and no more crashes.

4. After installing the K80 the server went from being relatively quiet most of the time significantly louder. I knew it would happen as the K80 is passively cooled (has no fans of its own) and relies instead on being in-line with the airflow path from the CPUs out the back of the unit. But holy cow it's a lot louder, so much so thatI had to move my entire server rack to another part of the house (the basement) because whereas before it had made some noise but was passable, following the K80 install it was insufferable. Even now you can hear it whining from across the house and behind a door.



This is the conclusion I've come to as well. I picked up a separate rack mountable computer Case and am presently on the lookout for a newer generation Intel chip/mono combo. Prefer not to buy new, so I'm just watching the marketplace ads for something probably 7th Gen or better to come up for cheap. Question for you sir: how much Ram did you feed it and for how many cameras? And did you give it a GPU at all? I currently have 8x 4k cameras but would like to eventually double that number. I'm thinking with a newer generation cpu 16gb should be fine.

So that's my plan and the conclusion of that research! My R730 continues to run Blue Iris until I get a separate box with a desktop Intel chip going for it at which time my R730 will go back to just lab use.

I hope this helps others who've considered this setup.

I have no practical experience with this yet. But after doing a bunch of research it appears that once BI takes over the QSV of the Intel CPU, it's game over for anything else that might need the CPU, such as Plex. So my plan now is to build a server with an i7-12700 and a GTX 1660 or RTX 2060 Super. Blue Iris will utilize the QSV of the i7, while any Plex transcodes will go through the external GPU. This will still be less expensive than buying a Synology DS920+ with an expansion enclosure, and significantly much more powerful.