Home server direction??

[Kenny8282]

Hello all! 

 

For starters I know enough about building pcs to be dangerous but have never gone down the road of a server. 

 

Needs:

• In home storage solution for family photos and video (redundancy key)
• I do a lot of small project and design work for fun and have built up a large amount of meaningful project data
• Small kids and i have heard about how cool plex can be ( tons of old dvds laying around) 
• Security camera nvr is no longer supported by manufacture and I am unable to access the cameras from their app (poe cameras) it still records to its own internal drives. 

Currently have:

• 18u rack installed in my closet right next to my media panel. 
• 4u server chassis with 10 hot swap bays

Options:

1. Build a single server attempting to run a nas and blue iris from a VM on the same build. 
2. Build a dedicated NAS server in the chassis I have running two pools, one for vital storage and one less secure for the video back up. This could be a much lower powered server. But a second machine would be required to run blue iris. 
3. ???? 
4. ????

I have heard running blue iris on a VM can be tough. I have a current new build personal computer almost complete and when it is done I can use my current i9 9900k as a blue iris pc in a server chassis. 

 

I would like all your input on which route might be best or easier for someone like me to implement. I would also like some hardware reccomendations as I'm likely to overbuild past my actual needs. 

 

Regards,

 

Ken 

[Ralphred]

1 hour ago, Kenny8282 said:

I have heard running blue iris on a VM can be tough.

Why do you need to isolate it from your plex install?

[Bdavis]

TrueNAS should be able to do everything you described above. Just keep in mind that redundancy is not a backup. I actually have two TrueNAS boxes one for production data, and one across the street that gets a nightly snapshot via a ubiquity gigabeam link. I recommend a build that has 10 gig networking and ecc ram. Both my rigs use supermicro x10 boards which I bought on eBay for around $150.

 

How much storage do you want to have, and how much do you want to spend?

[Kenny8282]

1 hour ago, Ralphred said:

Why do you need to isolate it from your plex install?

Doesn't have to be, ideally if I could do it all on one machine that would be best. I would rather spend the money on one overbuilt server that can do it all than a seperate machine.

[Kenny8282]

1 hour ago, Bdavis said:

TrueNAS should be able to do everything you described above. Just keep in mind that redundancy is not a backup. I actually have two TrueNAS boxes one for production data, and one across the street that gets a nightly snapshot via a ubiquity gigabeam link. I recommend a build that has 10 gig networking and ecc ram. Both my rigs use supermicro x10 boards which I bought on eBay for around $150.

 

How much storage do you want to have, and how much do you want to spend?

I am ok with 3500 including the drives. 

 I already have 2 8tb nas drives I can use from existing nvr that is really of no good anymore. 

 

I would like 12tb main and the two 8tb drives for my surveillance pool.  I'll be running 16 4mp cams so it does fill up quick but right now holds around 3 weeks of recordings. 

[m9x3mos]

4 minutes ago, Kenny8282 said:

Doesn't have to be, ideally if I could do it all on one machine that would be best. I would rather spend the money on one overbuilt server that can do it all than a seperate machine.

Yeah you shouldn't have to. Plex and blue iris can probably run off the same vm and pass it a gpu for hardware acceleration. 

For my personal use that is what I have setup as some of my services need windows and benefit from gpu acceleration. You would need a basic card for the host os and then a better one for acceleration. 

 

[Kenny8282]

34 minutes ago, m9x3mos said:

Yeah you shouldn't have to. Plex and blue iris can probably run off the same vm and pass it a gpu for hardware acceleration. 

For my personal use that is what I have setup as some of my services need windows and benefit from gpu acceleration. You would need a basic card for the host os and then a better one for acceleration. 

 

I have an old 2080ti which should be good enough. I was just nervous reading other forums saying blue iris doesn't like a VM. 

[Bdavis]

2 hours ago, Kenny8282 said:

I am ok with 3500 including the drives. 

 I already have 2 8tb nas drives I can use from existing nvr that is really of no good anymore. 

 

I would like 12tb main and the two 8tb drives for my surveillance pool.  I'll be running 16 4mp cams so it does fill up quick but right now holds around 3 weeks of recordings. 

That's a pretty generous budget. I'm not that familiar with Blue Iris and it's hardware requirements. TrueNAS Scale is still a little new, but has support for Docker which I find much simpler than using VM's.

 

Typically I wouldn't recommend a GPU in a nas as it's always on. Typically I try and focus on power consumption with a NAS build.

 

Attached is a picture of my main NAS. Specs are as follows:

 

Motherboard: Supermicro x10SRH-CF $150 ebay

CPU: Xeon e5-2620 $20 eBay

Noctua Cooler

64 gigs samsung DDR4 ecc ram

3x18tb Seagate hard drives

3x120gb ssds 2 boot 1 for apps/VM's

 

I prefer using server boards with IPMI it makes management super easy.

This build sits by my couch and the loudest thing is the hard drives when they do a seek. Eventually I'll move it to the basement when I get around to doing some wiring.

 

 

[Ralphred]

3 hours ago, Kenny8282 said:

I was just nervous reading other forums saying blue iris doesn't like a VM. 

If you use GPU pass through it won't even know really, as long as you set it's storage up right. But unless you are married to blue iris I'd check out some of the stuff that will run in a native *nix environment (zoneminder springs to mind?), plex does this so then you could eliminate the VM element entirely.

You should check whether truenas has any free plugins for plex or cctv software, it wouldn't surprise me if it did.

[m9x3mos]

16 hours ago, m9x3mos said:

Yeah you shouldn't have to. Plex and blue iris can probably run off the same vm and pass it a gpu for hardware acceleration. 

For my personal use that is what I have setup as some of my services need windows and benefit from gpu acceleration. You would need a basic card for the host os and then a better one for acceleration. 

 

Just like with any application, if you don't give it enough resources it won't preform well. That is a common problem with vm solutions. I haven't seen any application yet that wouldn't run just as well in a vm if it has the resources needed and the host isn't overloaded. 

[wseaton]

I currently have 25 cameras running off a 10yr old E3-1225 rig running Blue Iris. CPU utilization is at 33%. 

 

GPU acceleration with Blue IRIS only matters with transcoding. Aka, sending live streams to another monitor or display. Or, preparing a clip for viewing. 

 

When Blue IRIS is just recording it doesn't use GPU acceleration. It should be configured to run direct to disc. 

 

Biggest cause of CPU utilization with Blue IRIS is motion detect. I prefer to actually shut this off entirely and just use constant record. Using H265 and 15FPS this produces just a trickle of bandwidth. I only use motion detect if it's an office or something where I want to timestamp people exiting or entering. 

 

Great program, but typically not configured optimally. 

[Kenny8282]

Sounds like I will go for a single server build and spend the extra money on hardware for one rig rather than between two. 

 

Some great suggestions will be gladly accepted. Like I stated I already have the rack chassis which has 10 hotswap bays put front and 3 3.5" internal. 

 

I will more than likely also need a reccomendation for expa ding the sata ports. I have learned I will need an hpa pcie card or one that is flashed for truenas? 

 

Here is what I was looking at going with,

Cpu:

Intel Xeon Silver 4210

 

Cooler:

Noctua NH-D9 DX-3647 4U

 

Motherboard:

ASRock Rack EPC621D8A ATX Server Motherboard LGA3647 Intel C621

 

Ram:

NEMIX RAM 128GB 4x32GB DDR4-2400 PC4-19200 2Rx4 ECC Registered Memory

 

Sata expansion:

LSI 9211-8i 6G SAS HBA FW:P20 IT Mode ZFS FreeNAS unRAID 2* SFF-8087 SATA US

 

Power supply:

Seasonic FOCUS PX-750

 

Please let me know if something is an obvious miss. 

[m9x3mos]

18 hours ago, Kenny8282 said:

Sounds like I will go for a single server build and spend the extra money on hardware for one rig rather than between two. 

 

Some great suggestions will be gladly accepted. Like I stated I already have the rack chassis which has 10 hotswap bays put front and 3 3.5" internal. 

 

I will more than likely also need a reccomendation for expa ding the sata ports. I have learned I will need an hpa pcie card or one that is flashed for truenas? 

 

Here is what I was looking at going with,

Cpu:

Intel Xeon Silver 4210

 

Cooler:

Noctua NH-D9 DX-3647 4U

 

Motherboard:

ASRock Rack EPC621D8A ATX Server Motherboard LGA3647 Intel C621

 

Ram:

NEMIX RAM 128GB 4x32GB DDR4-2400 PC4-19200 2Rx4 ECC Registered Memory

 

Sata expansion:

LSI 9211-8i 6G SAS HBA FW:P20 IT Mode ZFS FreeNAS unRAID 2* SFF-8087 SATA US

 

Power supply:

Seasonic FOCUS PX-750

 

Please let me know if something is an obvious miss. 

With that bundle for the hba you will want to make sure the connections will work with the backplane you have in the case. 

[voyager_]

I have a similiar setup to what your looking to do. Im using unraid but any similiar OS should work fine. I have plex running in a docker with a windows vm to handle blue iris. The hardware running it is a 2600x, 32gb ddr4, k2200 qaudro for gpu transcoding with plex + booting, gtx 950 for the blue iris vm, LSI9207-8i handleing drives in the unraid storage pool, 500gb samsung ssd as cache+vm+plex storage for plex thumbnails and database (2 500gb drives in raid 1), generic sata card passed to the windows vm.

 

The way its setup up is that the gtx950 and generic sata card are passed to the windows vm, the gpu is used to handle transcoding for cameras, deepstack, and just take some load off of the cpu. The sata card is passed to give the windows vm access to the connected drives without having to deal with shares. This isnt needed, I wanted to be able to hotswap drives if I needed to image/restore/etc from a drive and it avoids some potential storage capacity issues that can occur with blue iris writing to a nas since it doesnt always know the free space. With blue iris makesure to set it to direct write (or something like that, sorry at work so I can't see the exact setting) it drastically reduces the resources needed by blue iris and have it set to run as a service so that it will launch without a gui. 

 

Performance wise the system has no issues, i have 4cores (total of 8 threads dedicated to the vm) while the others are left for unraid/plex. With the quadro handling the transcoding the cores dont see much load even with 7 streams transcoding at once while testing it. 

[Kenny8282]

8 hours ago, m9x3mos said:

With that bundle for the hba you will want to make sure the connections will work with the backplane you have in the case. 

Good point I wasn't even thinking about that!