Blue Iris VM

[CookiesLikeWhoa]

Don't know how much there is about this out there but I thought it was worth a shot!

So I'm planning on setting up a virtual box jail for my freenas here shortly. I wanna run a windows 10 VM out of it specifically for Blue Iris. The goal is to have some were around 8-16 IP cams recording 24/7 and use a dedicated volume on freenas for the storage.

The question I have is, has any one given this a shot? If so, success? I have VB set up on my workstation and have a pretty decent feel for how to get things to (mostly) work, so I figured this would be a good learning experience.

 

[Ericloewe]

It sounds like it could require some reading up on jail network connectivity, because there are a lot of moving parts for a somewhat real-time workload. It sounds like the kind of thing that will be easier in FreeNAS 10, mostly because you get rid of virtualbox.

By the way, and I don't mean to hijack the thread, but I've been shopping around for surveillance solutions. Do you have anything interesting to share about Blue Iris?

 

[CookiesLikeWhoa]

That's what I was afraid of. The vm inside a vm thing seemed like it might be a networking nightmare. I'd really rather avoid setting up a dedicated system.

I've heard a lot of good things about blue iris but have personally not used it yet.


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[9C1 Newbee]

This may or may not interest you. Zoneminder is being worked on.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/zoneminder-on-freenas.14463/

 

[D G]

Blue Iris has been regarded as the go-to DIY solution for NVR software for a while. It's not free, but a small cost compared to much less-featured commercial products.
For cameras, I'm enjoying my exterior dome POE cameras from Amcrest. Way better firmware than HIKvision IMHO


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[CookiesLikeWhoa]

Thanks for the suggestion on POE cameras. I was looking about the Hikvision camera's but will definitely give Amcrest a look too.

 

[D G]

Yeah I got very frustrated with HIKvision very quickly, but it's possible I just had a bad experience. They're a bit cheaper than Amcrest, but so far I've been pretty impressed with my Amcrest cameras. I got one of the 2MP indoor PTZ ones that's not POE, but I still ran POE to it and then used a splitter at the end to give it the DC power it needs. I also got the 3MP outdoor dome camera, which I'll be buying more of in the future as budget allows. Overall the firmware has been very stable and it's native English (HIKvision can be tricky to make sure you're not buying the Chinese models). I don't use Amcrest's cloud service, so I can't speak go that, but I'd recommend against it anyways for security reasons. I would only have your cameras viewable from your local network, and if you want to view them remotely, set up a VPN :)
If you have any questions, I'm by no means an expert yet, but I'd be happy to share what I've learned.


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[CookiesLikeWhoa]

I have a VPN set up on my pfSense box that works wonderfully. I like being able to check on my network and servers from my phone.

My major concern really is how is the networking going to be inside VB. If that can get set up then I'll be a happy camper. If all else fails I might just set up a 1U atom system to run windows out of for it or set up an ESXi system.

 

[Mirfster]

FYI, I am hawking this thread cuz I want to do something similar. Amcrest sounds interesting. ;)

 

[wtfR6a]

Ive been running Blue Iris under Win Server 2012 r2 in virtualbox with 3 4mp hikvision cameras. On my e5-1650v3 processor direct to disk consumes around 20% or so CPU, see graph below. It works well enough. Feel free to post back if you need any help. I was going to put a guide together to cover build of the jail and configure blue iris but haven't found the time yet.

Edit: Be careful about giving those cameras access to your fileshares, I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them. Segregate into separate VLAN / LAN and block outbound access on your firewall would be my advice. Depending on your exact setup, they shouldn't need the ability to talk outside your network and you can manage external access via a inbound VPN connection.

 

[D G]

I would think networking shouldn't be a problem, even inside a VM/hypervisor. I don't have Blue Iris set up yet, but as long as cameras are ONVIF compliant, should be pretty much plug and play setting up the cameras in Blue Iris.


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[CookiesLikeWhoa]

Well I need to get over the first hurdle of getting this windows VM to start...giving me a Failed to load VMMR0.r0 (VERR_NO_CONT_MEMORY) which won't let the VM start. Now to figure out how to fix that.

Just kidding it started to work. From what I gathered that error was due to incorrect permissions. I had set it to all everyone but I Think it took some time to actually take effect.

 

[CookiesLikeWhoa]

So not entirely on point but does anyone have a good VNC program? Right now I'm using RealVNC and the pointer offset is driving me mad. I've seen TeamViewer recommended, but haven't tried it yet. Any recommendations would be great.

Also, does anyone have a good guide to VLAN set ups? I want to have all of the cameras on their own VLAN but still be able to monitor it from my workstation. As far as Freenas goes, the Cameras will have their own volume, and that will be their only access to the NAS.

 

[maglin]

RealVNC is excellent. Your curser is related to a driver conflict. I've spent a day figuring it out. Turned out the version of Debian I was using wasn't supported. Went to an earlier release and the guest extensions installed properly and the cursor was normal. It's due to the really old version of virtual box FreeNAS is running.


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[CookiesLikeWhoa]

Alright so here's an update on this project.

VB on Freenas is a bit...finicky for me to say the least. I decided it would be easier to set up a VM on an ESXI node to handle this. The problem is I've run into a what is the "best practice" situation here. I haven't actually deployed it yet, just trying to work out the network topography.

I plan to have all the cameras on their own vlan, 192.168.4.xxx as to isolate them from my main network, 192.168.2.xxx. The Windows VM on the ESXI node will have 1 of the gigabit ports passed through to it and configured to 192.168.4.xxx for managing the cameras/blue iris. Now I don't know how much of an issue this is, but the VM will still have connectivity to the local network via the virtual connection from ESXI. Would this be a security issue, if so what's the best practice for dealing with this? The VM itself will only have access to its own volume on the freenas via a CIFS share.

Any advice would be most appreciated!