Running a video management server as a VM?

[WSDJamie]

Hey Everyone,
We have some ExacqVision camera servers at our school district. ExacqVision supports running running their software as a VM which is great.

The security camera footage gets rather large. I was thinking about maybe hosting the ExacqVision VM on a standalone host. Then using the local storage as a multi terabyte qcow or .raw file as the video storage disk.

Has anyone here has done anything like this? I think i'm mostly concerned about the multi terabyte qcow or .raw file.

 

[bbgeek17]

There are many variables that go into making a decision where and how to store the data. For the video service you need to look at the rate at which writes are made. You will be better off with dedicating some storage for video specifically, i.e. separate from your OS and app. That can be done with:
- passthrough a dedicated disk as raw storage, format it as ext4/zfs/xfs - whatever you want.
- get two or more disks to create a raid if disk failure and storage loss is something you are concerned about
- get a non-expensive NAS/NFS storage and point the solution to it, if it allows. This will allow you to handle hypervisor loss. It will also allow you to expand single host to cluster in the future if you decide to do so. Most of the NAS options come with at least disk protection built-in.

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Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[WSDJamie]

There are many variables that go into making a decision where and how to store the data. For the video service you need to look at the rate at which writes are made. You will be better off with dedicating some storage for video specifically, i.e. separate from your OS and app. That can be done with:
- passthrough a dedicated disk as raw storage, format it as ext4/zfs/xfs - whatever you want.
- get two or more disks to create a raid if disk failure and storage loss is something you are concerned about
- get a non-expensive NAS/NFS storage and point the solution to it, if it allows. This will allow you to handle hypervisor loss. It will also allow you to expand single host to cluster in the future if you decide to do so. Most of the NAS options come with at least disk protection built-in.

---

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

Thanks for writing. I like the idea of passing the disks to the host. I have 12 EXOS drives in the new boxes. I was going to set them up as a ZFS pool and then store the .raw or qcow there.

Unfortunately this is a Windows VM, so it's going to want to format that as NTFS. I guess I could put a hardware raid card in there and then pass that through to the VM.

 

[bbgeek17]

I dont have much experience with passthroughs. Perhaps you can pass all disks, then let windows handle disk management.
I would try to avoid writing your video data into qcow if at all possible. There is no technical reason why you cant, but seems like unnecessary layer with that large amount of data in a single pool.

---

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[Dunuin]

There is no raw file. When using ZFS without qcow2 it will use zvols, which are block devices using raw format, that you could format with NTFS or whatever you want. But keep in mind to increase you volblocksize or you will waste a lot of capacity due to padding overhead when using a raidz1/2/3. And a ZFS pool should always have 20% of free space, so another 20% of capacity lost.