I thought I would write down the spec's of my BI5 pc so people can start to make a decision on what they can run BI on.

I run a headless server (i.e. a normal pc without a screen) in my garage. I usually use "Splashtop" to remotely log in to it, unless a Windows update has managed to break it. It has:

1. Win10 Pro running on a Samsung 250GB SSD.
2. An AMD FX-8350 8 core CPU running at 4Ghz.
3. 32GB of RAM.
4. A second Samsung 250GB SSD specifically for BI5 database and "New" files.
5. A WD Purple 4TB drive for long term storage of BI5 files. I get about 1 month.
6. Emby media server - Has a 2TB and a 4TB drives for recordings.
7. Homeseer HS3 Pro for all home automation duties. BI plug in for control. Home telephone whitelisting with HSPhone. No spam calls
8. TVMosaic - Dual S2 satellite receiver with a fixed and a motorised dish. Dual T2 receiver. Uses another 2TB HD for recordings.

BI5 presently has 3 1080 IP cameras on it, and two old analogue cameras via a Piccolo Pro 2 PCI card. BI5 is set for 24/7 recording, but does motion detection alerts too. BI takes around 9% CPU, and all of the other software runs very well, and doesn't miss a beat.

How about you guys and gals ?

Nice setup.
Myself I run my BI (still on V4) on dell poweredge T30 located in my server room. I also run a PLEX server as well as Homeseer pro with all the plugins for BI, Ademco and Life360. All of my cams 12 in total are Unifi (various models) albeit I have one that is not cooperating with BI at the moment. I send all footage, clips and alerts to my Dell T330 storage server that has about 27TB of available disk space. My cameras as well are 24/7 usually catching deer eating my wife's plants.

Cool setup.
I used to run my on a separate box, but I decided to setup BlueIris running in a Virtual Machine on my "server" to downsize the number of boxes I have in our house (makes the wife very happy!).
I have 3 cameras and I give it 4 GB of RAM and 1.5 TB of storage and after a couple years seems to be running very well.
The host is an i7-3700K with 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD for Win10 Pro and 3 VMs. We have around 30 TB for storage.

I've never run VM's. What is the advantage of them over putting everything into my single Win10 installation ?

It's interesting that the child at ipcamstalk [sic] always states that BI should be on its own pc with nothing else, and even worse, anybody even thinking about a VM must be deranged. None of us are following that logic, and it sounds like we all have good all round systems ! Well done free thinking people of the world

TimG wrote: ↑Sat Jun 29, 2019 8:29 am I've never run VM's. What is the advantage of them over putting everything into my single Win10 installation ?

It's interesting that the child at ipcamstalk [sic] always states that BI should be on its own pc with nothing else, and even worse, anybody even thinking about a VM must be deranged. None of us are following that logic, and it sounds like we all have good all round systems ! Well done free thinking people of the world

Yes, I've had run-ins with that child over VMs and don't go back there.

I did have BlueIris as a stand alone box at first but thought I could run it just as well in a VM. So I decided to give it a try. If it hadn't worked out I would have gone back to the stand alone box. It worked out very well with my 3 cameras. Maybe if I had more it might be sluggish but I've not encountered that. Also, I like to have VMs for specific tasks that are separate and don't need to mix with the rest of my computer. For example, I have a Tax VM which I install tax software on every year. There's no conflicting with other software on the system as the Tax software is the only thing in that VM. The same with BlueIris, it is in its own VM and no other software is installed to possibly conflict with it. Also, if there's a BlueIris update that hoses the setup I can always go back to my most recent VM backup (weekly).
So by not having a separate box it makes my setup less complex and less chance for conflicts between various software. I've used VMs for years at home and at work so I'm very comfortable with them.

My multi-use setup:
Win 10 Pro on 120GB SSD, with 4 drives - now running headless

Intel Core i3-3225 3.3Ghz, 16GB ram
10x cams, 1-5MP via a second Lan card.
7x cams continuously record to a 4TB drive
3x cams continuously record to a 1TB drive
- gives 8-10 days of recordings.

All of our TV is recorded from two quad S2 sat cards and from HD IP streams and stored on a 2T drive. TV and media playback is via NextPVR/Kodi.
Another 2T drive stores automated backups from family PCs.
A weather station records direct to the SSD.

CPU runs at 20%
remote-in via splashtop it goes up to 60%
remote-in with BI in viewing mode takes CPU up to 85%
If I just use Ui3 from another PC then CPU is 70%

I get good performance and reliability with this.

Hi nbobz, that's a serious pc !

Another multi purpose pc that runs well. What has the ipcamstalks [sic] child got against them ?

Do you remember why you use Splashtop instead of Teamviewer ? I use Splashtop too, but couldn't remember which feature dragged me in initially !

I have an M2.0 SSD, but found BI drops a lot of frames. Knowing that SSD's are not optimal for sustained writes, I added an old 2.5" 7200rpm Laptop SATA HDD for my BI recordings and all my issues went away. No more dropped frames on recording or playback.

Learning, unless you have a high-end SSD (which I didn't have), the old spinning disks can often be more appropriate to sustained writes. Could save someone a bit of cash.

VMware ESXi, 6.5.0, 8935087
Processor Type: AMD EPYC 7551P 32-Core Processor
Logical Processors: 64
I have a VM setup running Windows Server 2012 R2 with 20 cores and 16GB or ram. There are 30 Cams on this one (about 16 are 3MP+). The Processor runs about 15-20%

My home Blue Iris server has dual Xeon e5-2650's with 128GB of ram running on Windows server 2012. The server has 6 3MP Amcrest cams.

I'm one of the ones who got finger-wagged at on ipcam for doing VM BI.
I'm an ESX lover and I have an old 2009 Mac Pro that I've updated/converted into a house VM server.
Mac Pro with 2xX5690 with 12 cores @ 3.5GHz
128G of DDR3 ECC RAM
500G SSD for the VMs themselves.
4T spinner for BI video and VM backup.
SAS card hooked to 4x8TB spinners for a 24TB FreeNAS VM.
BI itself has 8 cores, 16G RAM, 32G SSD, and 400G of spinning disk.
There are 10 cameras and it runs anywhere from 50-70% CPU.
The server itself has another 7 VMs including home automation, media server (plex), NAS, backup router(OPNsense), AP control (unifi)
The server is linked to a dell PoE switch via 10G and all the cameras are on their own VLAN with no internet access so they can't be hacked/phone home. (they are all cheap Chinese IP cameras, better to insure their loyalty to me
BI has 2 Vnics so it can talk to both the cameras and the outside world.
I have external USB drives normally kept in a safe which I pull out every few months so I can backup the NAS.

There is also a CoLo server with more media related VMs (plex and Emby), general ISP related services (email/ftp/web/etc) and acts as a backup device for all the media at home.