Subscriber Discussion

Integrators, Do You Maintain A Test/Dev Server For Video?

TC
Trisha (Chris' wife) Dearing
Jul 02, 2015
IPVMU Certified

For staging or troubleshooting or demo...

Do you have a way of recreating any clients environment in at least a scaled down version?

Meaning a working install of all the VMSes you service, and a least few representative cameras from the lines you carry?

Will VMS manufacturers let you have a copy used only for this purpose cheap or free?

KL
Keefe Lovgren
Jul 02, 2015
IPVMU Certified

Chris,

Many if not all manufacturers (or distributors) will allow you to purchase demo equipment at a discounted price, for VMS licenses some will either discount that price as well or give you demo keys.

If you are going to a clients site to do a demo you can always connect a camera(s) to your laptop that is running your VMS. You can bring a camera(s) and mount them to a tripod that has a telescoping ability to raise them up to the required height.

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MM
Michael Miller
Jul 02, 2015

Yes we have multible VMs running at our office with different VMS running so we can test and compare features. This is great to test configurations and updates before we push them out to the customers systems.

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TC
Trisha (Chris' wife) Dearing
Jul 02, 2015
IPVMU Certified

Thanks.

Are the VM's and the host all sharing the same network adapters/storage? Do you only activate one VM at a time?

MM
Michael Miller
Jul 02, 2015

Yes that is correct one VM host and one iSCSI storage unit. I can run 8VMs or so at one time but the iSCSI storage gets hamered hard so we normally select the VMs we need to test and only run those. At some point I might upgrade to a faster NAS or fiberchannel unit but it's not really needed at this point.

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UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Jul 03, 2015

Yes, we use test bed and demo servers quite a bit. Since our servers are sometimes expected to record 100 to 150 cameras we test quite extensively. Our VMS provider has been very gracious in providing free, internal use licenses for stress testing equipment.

We also have some virtualized servers but those are primarily used for demonstration purposes.

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