Blue Iris Windows 11 or Windows Server?

[CCTVCam]

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No key appears locked into Windows hardware anymore. Windows Keys have been universal for some time. Only difference is between the version ie pro etc. ie each version has it's own key. Millions of people appear to have the same key therefore.

 

[David L]

Windows Server 2016 Question:

Wanting to upgrade to Blue Iris 6, have a PC I am thinking of installing Server 2016 on.

Here are the specs:



The BI PC won't have Internet access, will have 2 NICs so when I want to update BI I will manually plug in the Ethernet cable and Enable the NIC. It will be isolated from my network as my present BI 5 PC is. Only Home Assistant has access and one Remote PC. My Cameras get time from a NTP Server on pfSense router...



Hoping Server is not a resource hog like Windows...so guessing better CPU usage...

I know back in the day MS Server did not like GPUs, drivers that is and no DirectX support, guessing newer version fixed all that...

Maybe I am thinking of NT, haha.

 

[CrazyAsYou]

Windows

Windows Server 2016 Question:

Wanting to upgrade to Blue Iris 6, have a PC I am thinking of installing Server 2016 on.

Here are the specs:

View attachment 250817

The BI PC won't have Internet access, will have 2 NICs so when I want to update BI I will manually plug in the Ethernet cable and Enable the NIC. It will be isolated from my network as my present BI 5 PC is. Only Home Assistant has access and one Remote PC. My Cameras get time from a NTP Server on pfSense router...

View attachment 250818

Hoping Server is not a resource hog like Windows...so guessing better CPU usage...

I know back in the day MS Server did not like GPUs, drivers that is and no DirectX support, guessing newer version fixed all that...

Maybe I am thinking of NT, haha.

Windows 11 will perform better with that hardware as it will understand modern CPU/GPU instruction sets vs Win2016 - As Win11 won't have internet access you don't need to be concerned with all the telemetry crap and if you spend a little time de-bloating Windows 11 you'll not notice any improvements by using Win2016 server. Win2016 is also EoL Jan 2027 so even if a Win11 truly offline you still might want to patch it from time to time which you would be able to-do.

 

[David L]

Windows

Windows 11 will perform better with that hardware as it will understand modern CPU/GPU instruction sets vs Win2016 - As Win11 won't have internet access you don't need to be concerned with all the telemetry crap and if you spend a little time de-bloating Windows 11 you'll not notice any improvements by using Win2016 server. Win2016 is also EoL Jan 2027 so even if a Win11 truly offline you still might want to patch it from time to time which you would be able to-do.

Thanks, yeah I have used Winhance - Windows Enhancement Utility which works pretty good in getting rid of Bloat...

The PC presently has WIN11 Pro 26H2



It has been running find, no problem with updates...plan to wipe it with fresh install...

 

[TobiasF]

Windows Server 2016 Question:

Wanting to upgrade to Blue Iris 6, have a PC I am thinking of installing Server 2016 on.

Why you pick Server 2016?
The equivalent to Windows 11 would be Server 2025.

It sould be about like this:

Server 2016 --> Windows 10, version 1607
Server 2019 --> Windows 10, version 1809
Server 2022 --> Windows 10, version 21H2
Server 2025 --> Windows 11, version 24H2

 

[David L]

Why you pick Server 2016?
The equivalent to Windows 11 would be Server 2025.

It sould be about like this:

It is what I have.

 

[CrazyAsYou]

Thanks, yeah I have used Winhance - Windows Enhancement Utility which works pretty good in getting rid of Bloat...

The PC presently has WIN11 Pro 26H2

View attachment 250820

It has been running find, no problem with updates...plan to wipe it with fresh install...

I would install proxmox on this host, then create a Win11 virtual machine with 16GB ram and the if needed for AI/CUDA do PCIe passtru for the GPU. Present a small ~120GB virtual disk from your fastest storage on the host ideally NVMe or at least SATA SSD for this drive. As for the CCTV recordings drive(s) you can either present a normal virtual disk from spinning rust large SATA or present the whole SATA hard disk(s) as a raw device.

You then have the reset of the host to add extra VMs or containers such as home assistant, OPNsense, pi-hole etc etc and have loads of control over the networking and VLANs for the WIN11 BI VM.