Milestone VMS Hardware

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@athornfam2 said in Milestone VMS Hardware:

Hi all...

We have an external vendor that's providing us security camera services which I believe could be better. In saying that, we are hitting roadblocks with expansions to our surveillance on our campus due to their suggestions to a previous set of leaders that were passive. With that said I'm trying to apply a bandage until we can go through our budgeting process to acquire funds.

What we have:

HP ProLiant ML350 Gen9 (Intel Xeon E5-2609 v4, 32GB Ram, 4TB of internal storage) with Mobile Server, xProtect Service Channel, and xProtect 2017 R3. Total of 58 cameras with an estimated projection of 150-200 through 7 buildings
HP ProLiant ML350 Gen9 (Intel Xeon E5-2609 v4, 32GB Ram, 4TB of internal storage) with Recording Server.
Cameras range in megapixel from 2.1 to 12
Ingested bandwidth ranges from 70-115 mbps depending on motion

Solutions:

I think that we could upgrade the CPU's (since we are still on xProtect 2017) or upgrade to a newer version of xProtect to replace the CPU's and add a Nvidia card for hardware acceleration.

Another option would be to migrate the physical server to our VMware cluster since our compute typically sits around 5-15% usage... We have (6) E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz in our cluster but lack the 8TB's of storage... However, I just decommissioned a SAN from our production environment which contains 16TB's (raw) 10K drives. So, I could setup iSCSI again to our environment solely for the camera system.

The only problem I see is that both the 3 servers in our cluster and the physical camera servers need replaced by 2023-2024 which is right around the corner. Its another story but the idea was to eventually to consolidate our 4 physical servers into a VM cluster with 4 or 5 servers total and add more storage to the HP MSA (only using 6 bays out of the 24).

If CPU is the problem you should upgrade the CPU on those server. The E5-2609 v4 is very slow.
With something faster such as dual E5-2680 v4 you will have at least twice the performance per CPU, but probably more.

Next, you want to check the memory configuration on the servers so that you are running with 4 or 8 RAM DIMMs per CPU. Preferably PC4-2400T type. This will give you the best memory bandwidth.

I think Nvidia GPU acceleration is probably not going to do much for you, since you have Intel Quicksync hardware acceleration in the CPUs for transcoding.

I would get refurbished CPUs since a CPU is a CPU. It's more or less impossible to wear them out. And since you intend to replace the servers in a year or two, you will have a hard time justify the budget for twin E5-2680V4 or similar performance.

You might want to have a look at the licensing as well on that server. Some opt for dual 8 core CPUs to optimize licensing. In that case the E5-2667 v4 is the one you want.

1337

@athornfam2

CPU & RAM upgrades are easy to do cause it's doesn't require any changes to anything. Only power down the server, taking out the old and putting in new CPU and maybe RAM and power up.

1337

@athornfam2
You've probably done this already but take a look at how you have set up the software too.
If you can record h264/h265 streams directly from the cameras without transcoding, it will lower the requirements from your servers.

https://doc.milestonesys.com/latest/en-US/standard_features/sf_mobile/mobs_directstreamingexplained.htm?TocPath=Add-ons|XProtect Mobile server|Configuration|_____2

You might also want to check that you are actually using the Quicksync acceleration of the CPU.

1337

@athornfam2

I'd avoid option 2. If your systems are transcoding the video, I believe you will lose the hardware acceleration if you run under vmware.

athornfam2

@pete-s

Thanks for the multiple responses.

From my understanding... Xeon chips do not come with Intel QuickSync thus the thoughts of adding a GPU and to reduce the need for a larger CPU https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000034104/processors/intel-xeon-processors.html#:~:text=None of the Intel,Intel Quick Sync Video. I'm not sure what the CPU limits are for the 2017 version of xProtect are, if any.

From a licensing perspective that is not a concern as we are under multiple academic agreements where licensing is minimal in cost or is part of a multi year agreement... If we are sticking with Windows a core count doesn't apply for us. So, what we would be looking at is cost/performance and whatever limitations the xProtect 2017 version have, if any.

I'm not totally sure if the board is single socket only but it may very well be dual... I'm assuming I can just replace that single socket of CPU with the one suggested and just replace the existing ram with the proper spec'd ram and ram channel configuration for that CPU. That would allow us room to purchase the same setup on the other side to expand if needed.

dafyre

@athornfam2 said in Milestone VMS Hardware:

Another option would be to migrate the physical server to our VMware cluster since our compute typically sits around 5-15% usage... We have (6) E5-2680 v3 @ 2.50GHz in our cluster but lack the 8TB's of storage... However, I just decommissioned a SAN from our production environment which contains 16TB's (raw) 10K drives. So, I could setup iSCSI again to our environment solely for the camera system.

If you are going to go that route, I recommend building your own ESX servers and storage for this.

(You can manage them with the same vCenter, just make sure your camera VMs have their own compute, network, and storage).

I'm running Avigilon software here (475 cameras) , and Network and Storage are our bottlenecks for speed. So if you were to put that load on storage meant for along with your general production VMs, it can definitely bring things to a crawl, lol.

1337

@athornfam2 said in Milestone VMS Hardware:

I'm not totally sure if the board is single socket only but it may very well be dual... I'm assuming I can just replace that single socket of CPU with the one suggested and just replace the existing ram with the proper spec'd ram and ram channel configuration for that CPU. That would allow us room to purchase the same setup on the other side to expand if needed.

Looks like it has dual sockets but it's likely that you're only using one right now.

Going from one E5-2609 V4 to something like two E5-2680 V4 would be a huge improvement.

1337

@athornfam2 said in Milestone VMS Hardware:

From my understanding... Xeon chips do not come with Intel QuickSync thus the thoughts of adding a GPU and to reduce the need for a larger CPU https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000034104/processors/intel-xeon-processors.html#:~:text=None of the Intel,Intel Quick Sync Video. I'm not sure what the CPU limits are for the 2017 version of xProtect are, if any

Sorry, my mistake. Some Xeons do come with Quicksync but not in the E5-2600 series it seems.

Hard to get a list of Xeon CPUs that support Quicksync but I think this will work:
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search/featurefilter.html?productType=873&0_QuickSyncVideo=True&1_Filter-Family=595

garak0410

I'm following this as I almost feel like the only Milestone user in the world sometimes...

athornfam2

@dafyre

For sure! We would definitely want to spec it out appropriately. At least, purchasing newer compute nodes... I'm thinking about just using the SAN and just ACL'ing it off so its not routable outside a certain VLAN. Its already got 16TB's of storage and you can DAS to it too with expansion shelves. I'm hoping that adding it to our current infrastructure is a last resort that I would fight.

athornfam2

@pete-s

Got it. With the CPU's under $1,000 a piece and the ram usage being so low we could easily upgrade the existing systems for about 2-3K each. Again, the initial concern that the district will have to deal with is that the system is coming up on EOL.

1337

@athornfam2 said in Milestone VMS Hardware:

@pete-s

Got it. With the CPU's under $1,000 a piece and the ram usage being so low we could easily upgrade the existing systems for about 2-3K each. Again, the initial concern that the district will have to deal with is that the system is coming up on EOL.

It's even lower than that. I think you're looking at well below $1K per server.

I've heard Servermonkey is good reseller of refurbished servers and parts. They're a HPE solution provider so they should know exactly what you need for doing an upgrade. You might need a heatsink or something besides the CPU. I would get a quote from them.

Xbyte is popular reseller too but they're Dell only.

Upgrading is good because it buys you some time before the servers goes EOL. It also gives you a good starting point for specs on a new system.

athornfam2

@pete-s

So, I think we may go down the route of just replacing the single socket CPU. I was seeing listings for that CPU around $550 through one of our partners. Ram configuration is already to spec for that CPU at single rank 8GB 2400 MT/s. That should get us through until June of 2023 when the system and cough.... vendor should be kicked to the curb.

scottalanmiller

@garak0410 said in Milestone VMS Hardware:

I'm following this as I almost feel like the only Milestone user in the world sometimes...

So for you this thread is a ....

wait for it....

milestone?

scotth

@scottalanmiller said in Milestone VMS Hardware:

@garak0410 said in Milestone VMS Hardware:

I'm following this as I almost feel like the only Milestone user in the world sometimes...

So for you this thread is a ....

wait for it....

milestone?

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