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Is Blue Iris marketed to home or SMB users?

Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2019 12:04 am
by Biggen
It doesn’t run in a VM because of its need for Quick Sync. Are there any SMB still running physical hosts for one specific application? It’s 2019. If you aren’t running your infrastructure inside of VMs, you are dating yourself and making it harder to migrate, backup, rebuild, etc... than it should be.

It makes me wonder if Blue Iris is really geared for production ready enterprise markets or simply home users. I see they offer paid support, so they must think what they are selling is for production environments.

I like Blue Iris. It’s an amazing piece of software. But it’s hard to justify building out another server for one specific program. Has there been no internal talks about selling another version of Blue Iris that can be virtualized without killing the CPU due to not having access to Quick Sync. Milestone and NX Witness handle being virtualized just fine.

Re: Is Blue Iris marketed to home or SMB users?

Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2019 1:21 pm
by spammenotinoz
Biggen wrote: Mon Jul 29, 2019 12:04 am It doesn’t run in a VM because of its need for Quick Sync. Are there any SMB still running physical hosts for one specific application? It’s 2019. If you aren’t running your infrastructure inside of VMs, you are dating yourself and making it harder to migrate, backup, rebuild, etc... than it should be.

It makes me wonder if Blue Iris is really geared for production ready enterprise markets or simply home users. I see they offer paid support, so they must think what they are selling is for production environments.

I like Blue Iris. It’s an amazing piece of software. But it’s hard to justify building out another server for one specific program. Has there been no internal talks about selling another version of Blue Iris that can be virtualized without killing the CPU due to not having access to Quick Sync. Milestone and NX Witness handle being virtualized just fine.
First of all, BI can Use QuickSync or a GPU in a VM, but before we go there.
a) BI config (including license details) are in the config file (autobackup) , can be set to an external source. Restore is an import of the config. It works, have tested many times. Always do this to another PC, prior to upgrading my main box.
b) Unless there is a new feature Miletone, it uses the CPU when virtualised and NOT the GPU. They do make it easier to support GRID GPU's and the likes.
c) I find BI runs just file with comparable settings using the CPU like Milestone.
d) If you know what you are doing, BI and Milestone can use Quick Sync and\or GPU under vmware, but for both it's fiddly and custom config. But more a limitation of your Hypervisor than BU or Milestone.
The basic principles are;
- You need to use UEFI drivers to boot
- Expose Hardware Assisted Virtualisation to the Guest OS
- Change memory to reserve all memory
- hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = FALSE
- SMBIOS.reflectHost = “TRUE”
Following 2 required in addition to the above to use GPU
- pciPassthru0.msiEnabled = “FALSE” #Refer: https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micro ... Id=2092964
You will need to install your NVIDIA GPU Drivers on the guest VM

Milestone has the same limitation, as the issue is with the Hypervisor but can be overcome (depending on your hypervisor and your hardware). Have not used NX Wirness but that will be exactly the same as BI and Miletone, in-terms of access to Quick Sync and GPU.

Re: Is Blue Iris marketed to home or SMB users?

Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2019 3:34 pm
by Dragaxx
I have 2 servers that run Blue Iris as VM's. One is a VMware ESXi, 6.5.0, server and the other is a Vmware Workstation Player VM. I dont have any issues.
The ESXi server runs 30 cams. The VM player has 6.