Proxmox BI setup

Defender574

Getting the hang of it
Nov 11, 2024
107
84
USA
Got bored and transitioning my windows 11 homelab to Proxmox. Ill have a Debian VM for my Jellyfin server that definitely needs iGPU passed through. I currently have 7 cams that record direct to disk that get alerts from IVS rules. Am I going to suffer by not having an iGPU or will it not be an issue?
 
With 7 cams recording direct to disk and the alerts coming from the cameras' own IVS rules, you probably won't miss the iGPU much. The main thing is to make sure every camera has its substream set up in BI, so BI is only decoding the low res streams and the main streams just get written to disk. Once substreams are in place a lot of people here run with hardware acceleration off anyway, since it saves very little on top of that.

For the Windows VM in Proxmox, I'd set the CPU type to host instead of the default, give it a few cores, and put the recordings on their own disk so the constant writes don't compete with your other VMs. Then watch BI's CPU usage for a few days before worrying about GPU passthrough.
 
I checked my settings and realized Hardware Acceleration wasn't enabled. My Proxmox setup is ready now, though—the Windows VM is prepped for Blue Iris with your recommended settings, and I've temporarily set the HDD to read-only during the setup phase.

How do you like Proxmox? Blue Iris has been rock solid for me over the last two years, and maintaining that level of reliability is my top priority. However, as I’ve added more Docker containers and a Jellyfin server, running everything on a Windows 11 desktop is starting to feel sloppy and disorganized. I really need a cleaner, more reliable setup for all my media and docker apps without compromising Blue Iris in the process.
 
Proxmox is quite good at most things. I've been using it at home and at work for years, without paying for any support license. One great feature is its "proxmox backup server" which you can install on a NAS as a docker container or VM and it can handle efficient incremental backups of all your VMs and their virtual disks. It even has "live restore" where you can boot from a backup and it pulls in disk data from the backup files as needed until the full restore is done. Don't have to wait for the complete restore before using the VM.

The only major bug I ever had with Proxmox was that live migrations of VMs between nodes would cause some random VMs to lock up until the migration finished. And much less frequently, automated backups would cause the same issue. It only impacted VMs on machines where I was using ZFS as the filesystem for VM disk storage. Nothing I tried ever fixed it, not even running a newer kernel like you might find some people saying is the fix (back in about 2023). Well the last time I ran into the issue was late 2025 on a fresh new cluster. Throttling transfer rates for backups and migrations was the only thing that helped me and it did not solve the issue completely.
 
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