Posts made by biggen

Yeah its strange that Xen's base file system is still ext3. I mean, that is very very old. Wonder what the holdup is to move it to at the very least ext4?

@Pete-S
Pete, I actually found your post (at least I think it was from you, I was tired last night) from a year ago or so on here about doing exactly that. I may test that method out as well.

Well I went ahead and used the "Experimental" EXT4/XFS drivers. They work fine from what I can tell. I actually used XFS and not EXT4. I haven't installed an OS on EXT4 in years.

But you are still limited to 2TB for the VHD size no matter the underlying file system. So I had to create multiple 2TB vhds with xcp-ng for that SR, attach those vhds to the VM, and then span the volumes in the VM guest to create one large fat drive. It's not quite an elegant approach but I guess it works nonetheless.

One thing I don't like is xcp-ng doesn't make it very easy to figure out how to use all the available space on the SR when creating the vhds. For example, after I added my 6TB SR, I needed to break that up into 3 vhds. So I created two 2TB vhds and needed one more to use the remaining space. However, you have to do some math here to figure out how much space you have left as I noticed xcp-ng will let you overprovision the SR to your heart's content. I could have created a dozen 2TB vhds on the single 6TB storage repo if I wanted to. Also, when creating vhds, it asks you how large you want the vhd to be in GB (Gigabyte) but after you create it, its shows you the size in TiB (Tebibytes).

@black3dynamite said in No way to create larger than 2TB virtual disk with Xen or XCP-NG?:

@biggen said in No way to create larger than 2TB virtual disk with Xen or XCP-NG?:

There must be some other limitation than just “ext3” restricting us to 2TB. According to the wiki, ext3 can use a max file system size between 4TiB and 32TiB depending on the block size.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3

Thin provisioning uses vhd and that has a 2TB limitation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHD_(file_format)

Ok. Thanks for that. I may play with that experimental ext4 drivers.

There must be some other limitation than just “ext3” restricting us to 2TB. According to the wiki, ext3 can use a max file system size between 4TiB and 32TiB depending on the block size.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3

@black3dynamite said in No way to create larger than 2TB virtual disk with Xen or XCP-NG?:

2TB limit is because of ext3.

Gotcha. No way to simply pass the disk through?

I just popped a 6TB drive into my new xcp-ng host and added it as a storage repo. I then wanted to create one large 6TB virtual disk since I only need it to be used by one specific VM. Come to find out, you can't. You have to break up the virtual disk to no more than 2TB in size. So I'd have to create three virtual disks and then attach all three to the VM in question. Then inside the VM I'd use the specific OS tools to span the disk (e.g. LVM, etc...) so I could realize the entire size and not have to mess with smaller chunks (e.g. multiple drive letters).

Is there no way to just pass the whole disk right to a VM? With KVM, you can simply create a disk element that defines whatever storage you want to pass through and then attach it. Is there no similar functionality with Xen (xcp-ng)?

@black3dynamite

It wasn’t cheap. But the host needed an upgrade, I was rocking an old 2 core i3 Ivy Bridge. It was time for an overhaul.

Just as an update to this thread, I upgraded the host to an i9 9900 CPU (8c/16t). There is now plenty of horsepower to chew through the H.264 decoding without having to use Quick Sync.

I'm happy I was able to keep it virtualized. I've been playing with XCP-NG and blown away how easy it is to use. I think I've found my new love...

@scottalanmiller Ok, thanks for that Scott. I'm going to try running that camera software I made another thread about in a VM via XCP-NG. I upgraded the host to a 6C/12T I7 8600. If I can't do it with that much horsepower, I'll just go back to my original plan of a single host (Win 10) system for the cam system.

So far loving XCP-NG with XO and XenCenter. What an amazing piece of software. I wish I had seen this years ago before I shelled out money for an ESXi Essentials license.

I see there is a way to quiesce a Windows VM according to this: https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xenserver-quiesce-snapshots/. What about a Linux VM? Is that still a work in progress?

I appreciate everyone's help. As I said, I'm just going to build a small Win 10 box and be done with it. That seems to be the simplest solution as it appears that is how the software was made to operate.

Thanks for the information guys!

@DustinB3403 said in Do I need to run AD if I install Server 2019?:

@biggen which very likely means that 99.99% of their user base is subject to fines from Microsoft.

Just because others are doing it, doesn't mean you're allowed too.

I understand what you're saying, but I also think it’s probably a bit unrealistic to hire a lawyer to decode the Microsoft EULA to decide if I’m allowed to run Win 10 as a base for an IP cam installation.

Maybe that’s me being naive.

/shrugs

@Dashrender said in Do I need to run AD if I install Server 2019?:

@biggen said in Do I need to run AD if I install Server 2019?:

So I think I’m going to stick with Blue Iris but just build out a separate machine just for that. I’ve got plenty of parts lying around to white box it. It’s features and GUI are just too good and other competing surveillance software wants licensing PER CAM while Blue Iris is a flat fee.

Seems silly to have a physical host for one specific application in 2019 but unless I want to pony up $$$ for another type of software, I guess this is it.

I’ll run it on Win 10. Reading on the intertubes, that seems to be working for the populace. It’s a shame it’s not designed for a more “production ready” environment. Maybe I need to bitch and moan on their forums for an “updated” VM ready version.

Running it on win10 does question- does cameras streaming TO Win10 violate licensing?

Scott and I agreed that unifi APs and the controller software on win10 does violate the license, requiring the use of windows server version.

I have no idea. Their recommendation is a Win 10 install. Not that it’s their problem if you invalidate a license. But I’d say that 99.999% of their user base has Blue Iris installed to Win 10.

So I think I’m going to stick with Blue Iris but just build out a separate machine just for that. I’ve got plenty of parts lying around to white box it. It’s features and GUI are just too good and other competing surveillance software wants licensing PER CAM while Blue Iris is a flat fee.

Seems silly to have a physical host for one specific application in 2019 but unless I want to pony up $$$ for another type of software, I guess this is it.

I’ll run it on Win 10. Reading on the intertubes, that seems to be working for the populace. It’s a shame it’s not designed for a more “production ready” environment. Maybe I need to bitch and moan on their forums for an “updated” VM ready version.

@Pete-S I don't think it's possible to disable it. In the web gui you can control fps, quality, compression etc... If I turn quality to 100% and compression off it actually makes the CPU usage go up on the VM not down.

I've looked into passing QS through but it's a PITA. And you lose gui on the physical server (which doesn't matter anyway).

Blue Iris just isn't designed for VM usage. Its built to be used in single physical machine. Goes against everything I've read for best practices.

@Pete-S said in Do I need to run AD if I install Server 2019?:

@Pete-S said in Do I need to run AD if I install Server 2019?:

That said, I don't understand why Blue Iris has to decode the h264 streams.

I'd like to get back to my earlier question. I think something is wrong with the Blue Iris setup.

Why does Blue Iris need to decode the H264 stream? Axis cameras already encode H264 and you save that to disk. The setting is called Direct-to-disc in Blue Iris.

According to B.I. website you won't get image overlay with camera name and time but who cares about that when the ip cam does that already by itself.

It's just not efficient to have the camera do h264, decode that with B.I into raw video and then have B.I reencode that into h264 again.

So CPU usage isn’t bad when no one is viewing via the Web GUI. On my test VM (gave it 2 cores) two cams with direct to disk recording were using about 50% of one core on an i3 Ivy Bridge (2C/4T). I was simply going to head to eBay and pickup an i7 4c/8t Ivy Bridge, drop it in, and off I go. But viewing the cams kills the CPU without Quick Sync being used. I opened two Web GUI streams of Blue Iris on two different computer and all of a sudden both cores of the VM were pegged at 100% and it became unresponsive. It’s the viewing the cams using the Blue Iris web GUI that kills it. The recording isn’t too bad.

@black3dynamite said in Do I need to run AD if I install Server 2019?:

@biggen said in Do I need to run AD if I install Server 2019?:

I guess I can look at some other VMS options.

Here's a couple of open source options.
https://zoneminder.com/
https://kerberos.io/

Zoneminder is pretty bad. It very antiquated. But I’ve never tried Kerbos. I’ll check it out. Thanks!

Ok wow. Well that clears up that I DONT WANT to run Win Server...

The issue is really Blue Iris. It decodes the H.264 byte stream. It doesn’t play well with Nvidia so it’s recommended to run it bare metal and let the Intel CPU and Quick Sync handle that. The folks that are running Win 10 or Server bare metal and then connected all their cameras to that I guess aren’t in proper licensing.

I guess I can look at some other VMS options. I know that NX Witness can run on Ubuntu so I could install Hyper-V core and run an Ubuntu VM for that. It’s just costly since NX Witness chargers per camera for licensing.

Having to think about it some more... Thanks for the suggestions guys. I knew I could count on advice here.

I own a small business. I have about a dozen Axis IP cameras currently recording (via Samba) to a physical Debian server I built. While it works ok, the free Axis camera software is pretty basic. I also use the Debian server as my OpenVPN server so I can remote in.

I’m wanting to move to Blue Iris camera software which only runs on Win 8/10/Server. Originally I was just going to spin up a VM via KVM on the Debian host and install it that way. What I quickly found out is that Blue Iris requires Intel Quick Sync to decode the H.264 stream. It can’t access that in a VM. Running the software in a test KVM Win 10 VM I spun up produced very high CPU usage. Checking around on the internet, people recommend installing Win 10/Server bare metal so that Blue Iris can access Quick Sync on the Intel CPU.

So what I’m thinking is that I can either (a) install Win 10 bare metal or (b) install Server 2019 bare metal. Blue Iris can then be installed directly. I can then enable a Hyper V role on either choice so I can install Debian again (via a VM) and get OpenVPN AS installed again.

I don’t host anything inside my business other than camera stuff. We are a retail gift shop and use a cloud based POS system so I don’t have to keep up with any of that.

So my needs are pretty simple. I’m just wondering if I go the Server 2019 route, do I need to set up an AD? Currently, my router handles all DHCP. I don’t even mess with internal DNS since I don’t host anything that we need to get to internally. I mean, I could setup AD as a learning tool (almost like a lab). I’m just wondering if there are any downsides to not using Server 2019 as an AD.