Converting ZM VM over to Bare Metal

[winstontj]

Will ZM be fine on an older Dell Precision T5500 workstation? It'll have dual CPUs (Xeon W5580 6-core CPUs), 36GB RAM and OS on a SSD. I'm not happy with the performance on a VM with 6 vCPU and 8GB of vRAM. I don't want to go crazy overkill but I don't want glitchy or broken videos like I have now.

Also have a network question. I've got an old Catalyst PoE 3560 switch. It's 10/100 with dual gigabit uplinks. Any concerns with that? The cameras and bandwidth throughput have been fine so far, just wondering if I should consider a newer switch. If I get a new switch I'd do something like a SG300 PoE.

Thanks for any feedback or comments.

[iconnor]

You havn't said how many cameras, etc, but basically yes, you can use old hardware.

[winstontj]

Sorry my bad. I've only got two. The VM I have them running on is really glitchy and hangs up often. It is like nothing I've ever seen. I'm pretty good with hardware and server stuff --this seems like I have no clue about both hardware and software settings. Every other VM I have running on the ESXi hosts is fine. No performance issues, etc. But ZM on ESZi, on this hardware stack is giving me terrible performance.

We have two cameras, I want to add a third and if we live through Corona (with a lime) we'll probably add two more for a total of five. Currently two, I'd like to switch over to bare metal before I add the third (sitting on my desk) and eventually two more for total of five after that.


*****to anyone who might find this through a Google search, I do not fully understand how to tweak camera settings as well as ZM software settings so don't just assume ZM is terrible running in a VM. I just haven't put in the time and I'm frustrated. Others report good results running ZM virtual. I figured maybe it would be easier to move it over to bare metal so I can isolate variables --and I have the hardware laying around. This is just me being lazy and wanting to put it on bare metal vs. running as a VM. Zoneminder has been awesome, it's just that I don't have it set up properly and I think that the VM is introducing variables and making it more complex.

[iconnor]

ZM is cpu,ram,disk io intensive. However only two cameras shouldn't cause a problem. Do you have values in the MaxFPS, AlarmMaxFPS fields? remove them. Increase value of Options->System->WATCH_MAX_DELAY to something around 45 or more.


Beyond that you are going to have to look at logs and report them here. We are not psychic.

Finally, you can actually pay the devs (me) to log into your box and figure it out for you.

[snake]

An optional performance gain is: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=28292

Only advised for air gapped or unimportant deployments. Use at your own risk.

[winstontj]

Thank you both iconnor and snake. I thought I had mentioned three cameras. Currently running two, have the third wired and ready to add but the performance of my current setup won't work with any more cameras.

I believe one issue I'm having is writing to one single drive. ZM OS is on a big, fast, striped array (with other esxi guest vm's). I think that is fine. I think my issue is the two cameras writing to a single 1.5tb hdd. I have been getting lots of buffer over run errors and warnings and that seems to happen at right about the same time when there is motion on both cameras. When I try to hook in the third camera it just seems to break or be very unhappy.

What I really want to do is a 6-drive setup. 2x ssd for OS in raid1, 2x ssd for a day or week's worth of events/data in raid1, and then 2x big, slower hdd's also in raid1 for older, archives. I don't want to purge after 30 days, I want to keep every video from every event. So I'd like to have a higher/faster access drive for more recent events, and then something bigger and slower for older stuff. Is there a way to copy over or "move" older events while still maintaining the GUI's ability to search and view?

iconnor, after making the changes you suggested I'm not getting nearly the buffer overrun errors however I am still seeing them from time to time:

Buffer overrun at index 4, image 35324, slow down capture, speed up analysis or increase ring buffer size

Also I did something dumb today: updated without backup/snapshot. Getting SQL database errors:

2020-05-09 22:49:04.555785 web_php 1792 ERR SQL-ERR dbFetchAll no result, statement was 'SELECT `Id`, `MonitorId`, `Name`, `Cause`, `Notes`, `StartTime`, date_format( StartTime, '%y/%m/%d %H:%i:%S' ) as StartTimeShort, `EndTime`, `Width`, `Height`, `Length`, `Frames`, `AlarmFrames`, `TotScore`, `AvgScore`, `MaxScore` FROM Events WHERE Events.MonitorId = :selector0 ORDER BY DESC limit 20'params: 3 /usr/share/zoneminder/www/includes/database.php 185

2020-05-09 22:49:03.795825 web_php 1792 ERR SQL-ERR 'SQLSTATE[42000]: Syntax error or access violation: 1064 You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'DESC limit 20' at line 1', statement was 'SELECT `Id`, `MonitorId`, `Name`, `Cause`, `Notes`, `StartTime`, date_format( StartTime, '%y/%m/%d %H:%i:%S' ) as StartTimeShort, `EndTime`, `Width`, `Height`, `Length`, `Frames`, `AlarmFrames`, `TotScore`, `AvgScore`, `MaxScore` FROM Events WHERE Events.MonitorId = :selector0 ORDER BY DESC limit 20' params:3 /usr/share/zoneminder/www/includes/database.php 152

2020-05-09 22:49:02.864890 web_php 1792 ERR Sort field Id not in SQL Fields /usr/share/zoneminder/www/ajax/status.php 291

I did see that Ubuntu 18LTS did a database update today. Something probably didn't carry over and I'm the fool who didn't do a backup beforehand.