Seeking Hardware Advice... (low budget)

[knight-of-ni]

ZoneMinder spawns multiple processes per camera, which means the load will naturally spread quite nicely across all the cpu cores.
Lower processor load per cpu means less heat, which means less fan noise, which leads to a happier wife.

Additionally, I have, over the years, been able to make all the applications I use play nice with one another when running all in the same environment. This experience pre-dates the popularity/availability of virtual machines.

So in the case of my own production home server, using a hypervisor would only add unnecessary overhead. Development or commercial environments are different stories altogether.

Your needs may be different. Like any virtual solution, you need to determine if the virtual host hardware is sufficient to handle to needs of all the guests running on it.

[rockandroller]

Back on track with my project here. I bought four WD black 750's ( 2.5 inch) and got some drive caddies on eBay. They are in, and the RAID controller defaulted them into a nice 2TB RAID array. I downloaded an HP smartstart CD, booted with that, and all system tests run perfect.

So now I have a dual-Quad-core 3GHz Xeon with 12Gigs of ECC RAM, and a 2TB raid 5 array. My next step is to try for the most "known good" configuration for Zoneminder.

Can anyone using the latest stable build of Zoneminder recommend what I should do next?
In particular, what flavor of CentOS might be a good bet?
I'm leaning towards a Centos 6.4 install, partitioned as 80GB system drive, 20GB swap drive, and the rest of the space as a "data" drive.
Does that sound reasonable?

Also - is there any overwhelmingly compelling reason to use a DIFFERENT Linux distro?
(I'm used to running CentOS, have four remote servers running it now...)

[knight-of-ni]

I would encourage you to go with what you are familiar with. Don't let anyone tell you one distro is "better" than another.

With that said, I would not build a new system with CentOS 6. Since CentOS upgrades are either unsupported or not practical (the latest centos upgrade tool only works if you have never, ever installed a third part package, of any kind). You are just giving yourself more work to do when you finally have to upgrade to CentOS 7.

Oh, and the ZoneMinder API won't ever work on CentOS 6 because it's version of php is one version too old. The ZoneMinder API will be needed if you ever decide to use the mobile app, zmninja.

Instead, I'd encourage you to install CentOS 7 with or without a desktop. Doesn't matter for the purposes of ZoneMinder.
Then head over to zmrepo.zoneminder.com and follow the steps there to get ZoneMinder installed.

Some people get confused and try to install things like ffmpeg or vlc ahead of time. Don't do that. Let zmrepo install everything for you.

[rockandroller]

Cool!! Thanks very much for the advice, and I'm all for moving to CentOS 7 now, anyway.
From what I hear, there's only a few little command line utilities they renamed, so no hardship.
Anyway, I'm gonna install the graphical UI version...

[rockandroller]

And.. its coming along nicely. Little glitch installing CentOS7... it couldn't see the drive array.
(LiveCD of CentOS6 had no trouble seeing and partititioning it.)

Turns out the workaround is to add a couple lines to the installer string (you can append to it by selecting and pressing tab)...
Adding these two entries worked for me:
hpsa.hpsa_allow_any=1 hpsa.hpsa_simple_mode=1

So, it's in the process of making a base install right now.

Should I pre-install apache and mysql?
Or will the yum zoneminder install pull them in as dependencies?

[knight-of-ni]

Should I pre-install apache and mysql?

Sometimes I think I really do have a crystal ball. I answered that question for you already:

Some people get confused and try to install things like ffmpeg or vlc ahead of time. Don't do that. Let zmrepo install everything for you.

Everything really does mean everything.

[rockandroller]

Got it! everything is everything. However, I was a bit premature with my 'success' of installing CentOS7 on my P400 drive array.
That install crashed about 99% through. I wiped everything clean and did it again ("installation successful") - but it wasn't really a success as it was not able to BOOT. Tried a couple of times with same results (installed OK, but crashes on boot with "warning: could not boot"), so it seems the workaround for non-supported RAID controllers is not working in my case.

So forged ahead with a CentOS 6.7 install (which installed easily,and boots up just fine).
Will use that for testing zoneminder while I do more research on installing CentOS7 "on unsupported hardware"...

[knight-of-ni]

Aw, that sucks. RH removed the cciss driver. I see instructions that show how to boot with the parameters you mentioned and then install the kmod-cciss module from elrepo. However, that will probably causes boot issues after each kernel update. Yuck.

It sounds like a P410 works with the new hpsa driver, and they look to be pretty cheap on ebay:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/462919-001-GENU ... Sw9N1Vwl3Q

[rockandroller]

Actually... THINGS ARE LOOKING UP.
DL380 G5 now happily boots to CentOS7
Found the thread that detailed where to find the updated CentOS7 P400 driver iso, and followed the instructions given there, and lo and behold, was able to load the proper driver for CentOS 7 installation.

Actually, this morning I had nuked the 6.7 installation anyway, in order to test a win8 install ( thinking about buying another one of these 'bang-for-buck' servers for a video editing workstation...) . Was pleased to see that win8 has native P400 drivers, and they work pretty good (tested read/write 300MBs/200Mbs which is not too shoddy). **When I tested with the Centos6.4 drivers I got average 300/400 read/write (Max was 655/517) - which I hope should be adequate for Zoneminder.

Will have a look at the 410 (or better) raid cards as I start shopping for another one of these servers, but for now will forge ahead with Zoneminder testing on CentOS 7, with the P400! It's gonna be a month or more till I get all the cameras installed, so plenty of time to test on this hardware...

[dvarapala]

FWIW, I have found that the disk I/O may be more of a bottleneck than the CPU. My server is an i7-3770K (4 cores with hyper-threading); I have 11 IP cameras, most of which are 1920x1080 at up to 15 fps with motion detection active. With all that and an ALPR daemon running my overall CPU utilization is < 50%, but due to the constant database updates and writing of images to disk my load averages hover just above 2. When zmaudit is deleting old event files the system bogs down quite noticeably, more frames are dropped, etc. While that 8-core Xeon would be cool to have, I suspect it wouldn't help my situation very much.

As a first step, I modified the zmaudit script to "ionice" itself so that it has less of an impact while it is running. It may take slightly longer to delete the old events but that's OK as long as the disk never fills up completely. So far the disk utilization has stayed around the 95% threshold that I set.

Today I restructured my filesystem thusly:

• 1 64GB SSD divided into a 1GB /boot partition and the remainder as /
• 1 2TB WD Purple drive mounted at /var - this is where the MySQL database lives
• 2 4TB WD Purple drives in a RAID0 configuration mounted at /var/lib/zoneminder - ZoneMinder event files are stored here

The idea here is to spread the most intense disk I/O out across the 3 Purple drives. We'll see how it goes.