To virtualize or not

[harleyl7]

So I had some time today and I'm trying to figure out if I should put Blue iris on a VM or keep it baremetal

VM is 4vCPUs from an E2176G w/ 8GB ram allocated
Baremetal is i5-6500 with 16gb RAM.

Here's my little test:
VM 4 vCPUs:
Idle: 10-11%
All cams ui3: 11-15%
One cam ui3: 24-40%
Power with unRAID(VM) on and Blue iris: 252-267W
Power just unRAID with VM: 230


CPU on baremetal:
Idle: 8-10%
All cams on UI3: 11-13%
One cam: 50-53%

Power with unRAID on and Blue Iris: 235-250W

Power with unRAID no windows VM and bi baremetal: 235-246

Seems my baremetal BI machine is very efficient and I might be wasting time trying to virtualize it since I don't save power (one of my concerns) and the performance doesn't seem better. However, the single camera performance on the VM does seem better.

All the Watts isn't from just the Blue iris server and the unRAID server. There's also pfsense router, modem, small UPS, and 48p poe switch (biggest culprit for obvious reasons), 3 APs, and 6 cameras currently.

Any thoughts from the virtualization vs baremetal crowd?

 

[TonyR]

Is the baremetal fully optimized and employing sub streams?

 

[bp2008]

Virtualization doesn't improve performance, only efficiency (and even that depends on many factors).

Either way is fine now that Intel quick sync video is more or less irrelevant.

 

[harleyl7]

Is the baremetal fully optimized and employing sub streams?

Substreams yes. I will go through the optimization guide again. Never felt the need because it does so well.

Mainly was just trying to save power haha but it seems the baremetal is so efficient that it might not matter.