Hello All,
I have recently inherited the management of a zone minder server. I am pretty sure 1.24.x
The server is monitoring 20 cameras and runs at an average of 80% load. We are planning to purchase a new machine and split the cameras between the two.
Most things I have found so far are just hardware compatibility threads.
What are the recommended hardware requirements for servers? Memory, processors, storage?
TIA
Server Requirements
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pathetic_programmer
- Posts: 18
- Joined: Fri Dec 09, 2011 2:49 am
Re: Server Requirements
I believe the statement: "More is better", is in the Wiki and fits quite nicely here. The reality is, it all depends on what you want to do with ZM and how many cameras you have now and in the future. I don't know what kind of system you have right now, so it's hard to say what you might need to get. A multi-core processor is also definitely needed with that many cameras. The more cores the better since ZM uses multiple processes to work and your server should automatically load balance the workload on the cores.
Another thing is you forgot to mention your budget. Personally I recommend that you build the box yourself as you'll probably save some money and get a box that you know will be able to handle your ZM system. Don't go for the latest and greatest as that's just a waste of money. Go with the upper range parts before the prices jump to ludicrous levels. Also, RESEARCH the equipment you're thinking of buying. I bought a camera without researching it and wound up getting another camera because I couldn't get it to work with ZM. It started to work later on, but it was disheartening to get everything setup only to realize that I had no picture whatsoever. It'd also hurt if your capture cards are PCI and you ordered a motherboard that has only PCI-e slots.
My system is a AMD Athlon II quad-core running at 3.2GHz, 4 gigs of RAM with 512M shared RAM, 1.5TB HDD at 7.2k RPM and Pinguy OS. Zoneminder is in a virtual machine through VirtualBox running Ubuntu Server 11.10 and it only had 1g of RAM allocated to it as well as 1 core if I recall correctly. I have it running as a headless service in the background so that I don't kill the VB window since I'm OCD and hate having extra windows on screen. It does pretty good and doesn't eat up too many resources for the two cameras that I have.
All in all, this setup cost me around $600; which if I'm not mistaken I could have gotten a full DVR system with like 8 cameras for about the same price. However, I can surf, play games, program and more on this box, so I consider it worth it. This system has no real hard limits either, cept for the amount of cards I can put into the system.
If I went to a straight up Ubuntu Server with this hardware, I'm mostly sure it could easily handle a 20 camera setup........ But I don't have that many cameras, so I'm mostly stabbing in the dark here.
Another thing is you forgot to mention your budget. Personally I recommend that you build the box yourself as you'll probably save some money and get a box that you know will be able to handle your ZM system. Don't go for the latest and greatest as that's just a waste of money. Go with the upper range parts before the prices jump to ludicrous levels. Also, RESEARCH the equipment you're thinking of buying. I bought a camera without researching it and wound up getting another camera because I couldn't get it to work with ZM. It started to work later on, but it was disheartening to get everything setup only to realize that I had no picture whatsoever. It'd also hurt if your capture cards are PCI and you ordered a motherboard that has only PCI-e slots.
My system is a AMD Athlon II quad-core running at 3.2GHz, 4 gigs of RAM with 512M shared RAM, 1.5TB HDD at 7.2k RPM and Pinguy OS. Zoneminder is in a virtual machine through VirtualBox running Ubuntu Server 11.10 and it only had 1g of RAM allocated to it as well as 1 core if I recall correctly. I have it running as a headless service in the background so that I don't kill the VB window since I'm OCD and hate having extra windows on screen. It does pretty good and doesn't eat up too many resources for the two cameras that I have.
All in all, this setup cost me around $600; which if I'm not mistaken I could have gotten a full DVR system with like 8 cameras for about the same price. However, I can surf, play games, program and more on this box, so I consider it worth it. This system has no real hard limits either, cept for the amount of cards I can put into the system.
If I went to a straight up Ubuntu Server with this hardware, I'm mostly sure it could easily handle a 20 camera setup........ But I don't have that many cameras, so I'm mostly stabbing in the dark here.
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mastertheknife
- Posts: 678
- Joined: Wed Dec 16, 2009 4:32 pm
- Location: Israel
Re: Server Requirements
Before you go out and buy new hardware, you can try my patch to reduce zoneminder's cpu usage:
http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewto ... =9&t=17652
mastertheknife
http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewto ... =9&t=17652
mastertheknife
Kfir Itzhak.