Moving from VM to Bare Metal

[winstontj]

What's a good (modern) bare metal hardware equivalent of an 8gb vRAM with 6vCPU? (esxi machines have 2x xeon 5680 cpus)

Operating system is Ubuntu 18LTS and zm 1.35.2

If I simply move that ZM virtual machine setup over to a bare metal machine with a single Xeon 6-core CPU with 12gb RAM, ssd for operating system and 4-drive raid 10 for storage, will that be a big performance boost? I think our frame rate is too high and that, combined with everything being on a virtual machine (or being on a hypervisor host with other guest operating systems) is causing a bunch of buffer over runs and general problems due to latency and hardware that isn't fast enough.

I'd really like to either export the old data from old ZM machine and import it into the new bare metal ZM machine, or write the virtual hard drive images over to the new drives and then expand them to larger capacity on the new hardware. Does anyone have any opinions on this? Will I have any issues with drive mappings if I copy the virtual disk image files over to physical hard drives? Not asking about the raid part, currently running in the VM on 64gb vHDD which would write onto a 250gb SSD (then expand later) and currently have 1.2tb vHDD for cameras/events which I would write onto a 6tb raid 10 then expand it later.

Any issues with that approach? Thanks.

**I've googled and have found several older posts about moving ZM to new systems, etc. but they are all on much older operating systems, older versions of ZM, etc.

[4xgkg]

I can't answer that but just wanted to register that I too am interested to hear.

For what it's worth - I have this little cutie running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for other things which mostly run in Docker images (e.g. VPN server, Unifi controller): https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32464726775.html

If it's suitable to run ZoneMinder then I might just buy another one like this to put in my roof (so it's less likely to be stolen).

[parky]

I know you mentioned modern but modern means money. How about an HP Z400 ex commercial Workstation. CPU cores are available in 4 & 6 and the come with as much RAM and disk as you want for a recycling company. The bare bones can be had for about £100 delivered and is a good solid HP piece of kit. It's essentially a server in a big desktop case so is proper stable hardware wise

I run one with a Quad core 3GHz chip and 8GB ram booting Ubuntu 18.04 from an SSD with a surveillance drive for image storage. It runs 10 IP cameras on continuous record along with a number of analogue cameras on monitor via an encoder. Load on it is generally 2 out of a possible 8 so it never breaks a sweat. Electricity is it's only downside as it takes about 90 watts

Add to that a Cisco 48 port Gigabyte switch for POE at £30 delivered and that is another solid piece of industry kit. Again it consumes 90 watts with all cameras plugged in, but it's no more needy than a load of individual power packs. So for me it's cheaper and more capable than the commercial Samsung DVR that kept reporting it couldn't see the same drive that is recording Zoneminder images now

[momelod]

the Nvidia Jetson lineup ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous ... son-store/) looks interesting as they come with built-in GPUs that could be used with zmevent notification server for object detection.(https://github.com/pliablepixels/zmeventnotification)

I've not tried this myself but am very interested to know if anyone else has this setup working.

[Magic919]

Moving machines I have tried. I installed same ZM version, dumped the MySQL database and imported that on the new machine. Copy over the relevant config files. That gets you most of the way there.

Other than my usual Dell, I’ve tried an HP Gen 10 Micro. Certainly has more performance than my older Dell, certainly due to the newer Xeon.

I can’t see a Jetson Nano being enough, but a Xavier and some storage would be pretty good. It’ll be a power saving, but the machine itself is not cheap. I might try this out when I have a bit of spare time.