Hi,

I have recently upgraded my j1900, 8gb  server that ran 3 dockers; Sickrage, Transmission and Plex with a i5-6400 8GB, 128GB nvme for cache

aswell as the current workload of the 3 dockers I'm looking at trying to replace my Swann 4 camera NVR setup with either a Xeoma docker or a VM with Blue Iris

Would it be able to handle 4 cameras on Xeoma or if I could run a VM what would be a good recommendation?

Thanks,

Edited September 15, 20178 yr by Xalies

The docker should be lighter weight, and hence easier on system resources. The VM would require dedicating memory and you'd be running not just the camera software, but a whole other OS.

 

You'd definitely want your cameras saving files to a non-array disk. Otherwise the three write streams will slow down unRaid writes from your DLers. You could write them to your NVMe SSD, but I wouldn't. No need to burn all those write cycles on it for such a pedestrian need. I'd install another drive, maybe an older smaller disk, as an unassigned device and store the camera output there.

 

But I think your system could handle. Only way to know for sure is to try.

Im gonna be lazy and copy my post from another thread, giving you some details of mysetup and experience with unRaid+Blue Iris in a VM.

 

For reference to a couple of your questions, I am also running a Windows VM for my BI setup. 6 POE cameras, 4 always recording to a WD purple drive set outside my array. I do send my alert snapshots to an array protected share, as BI lets you configure what goes where and when.

 

I am running 6 cores of an e5-2670V1 with 4gigs of ram. It has been plenty of power for me so far(average CPU use 30%). All in all, it has been incredibly reliable. I pull up the stream via blue iris android app from home, work, tablet, phone, on the road, etc with no problem. I also run a Homeseer home automation system on a Windows VM, and have a few tablets set with Imperihome constantly showing a few of the camera feeds. Have yet to have any real hiccups, apart from some older cameras that didn't play nice and one poor cable termination(my fault) that gave me headaches for a couple of days before root cause being discovered.

 

A key to managing my CPU usage was to set each camera to blue iris DVR format, and direct to disk recording. This required me to set my overlays on each camera, but other than that no big trade-offs that have affected me anyways.