- Joined
- May 19, 2017
- Messages
- 1,829
First of all, a huge thank you to @Yorick for his excellent tutorial on how to install a windows 10 virtual machine on a FreeNAS server. Thanks to his easy-to-follow instructions, I had all that done in relatively little time. Also, a huge thanks to the iXSystems team for making it so simple to attach ISOs, set up a virtual machine, etc.
BlueIris is now running just fine and I agree that it’s in many ways superior to ZoneMinder though after all the spend to get here, my head is spinning somewhat. However, I counsel anyone following my footsteps to not activate windows 10 pro until they have settled on how many cores they need to get acceptable performance out of blueiris. This is especially acute on low clock speed systems like mine (D-1537). I found that I realistically needed to allocate 8 threads to the VM.
The stock allocation of cores to windows 10 (2 cores) is not suitable for intensive work. For anything beyond 2 cores / threads, you have to add two tuneables as mentioned by @blanchet as described here. The allocation of cores to a VM without the use of the tuneables does not seem to work as expected in FreeNAS 11.3 - i.e. you can set 8 cores in the VM control panel yet Windows only sees two unless you change the tuneables.
I do find the use of "virtual CPUs" to be a bit less than self-explanatory. Is it a thread or a core? etc. I wish that the ? marker in the GUI was a bit clearer and explained that "Virtual CPUs per VM = threads (i.e. # of cores x # of threads per core)".
Only then activate, once you know the system can handle the stress as subsequent changes to the processor core count allocated to the VM can make your activation break. the troubleshooter didn’t work, support was cheerfully useless, etc. The only workaround I eventually found was setting up my windows 10 login to use the MS global sign in (vs. a local one).
BlueIris is now running just fine and I agree that it’s in many ways superior to ZoneMinder though after all the spend to get here, my head is spinning somewhat. However, I counsel anyone following my footsteps to not activate windows 10 pro until they have settled on how many cores they need to get acceptable performance out of blueiris. This is especially acute on low clock speed systems like mine (D-1537). I found that I realistically needed to allocate 8 threads to the VM.
The stock allocation of cores to windows 10 (2 cores) is not suitable for intensive work. For anything beyond 2 cores / threads, you have to add two tuneables as mentioned by @blanchet as described here. The allocation of cores to a VM without the use of the tuneables does not seem to work as expected in FreeNAS 11.3 - i.e. you can set 8 cores in the VM control panel yet Windows only sees two unless you change the tuneables.
I do find the use of "virtual CPUs" to be a bit less than self-explanatory. Is it a thread or a core? etc. I wish that the ? marker in the GUI was a bit clearer and explained that "Virtual CPUs per VM = threads (i.e. # of cores x # of threads per core)".
Only then activate, once you know the system can handle the stress as subsequent changes to the processor core count allocated to the VM can make your activation break. the troubleshooter didn’t work, support was cheerfully useless, etc. The only workaround I eventually found was setting up my windows 10 login to use the MS global sign in (vs. a local one).
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