Server Hardware/Milestone Question

I have 10 of these sites we setup in the last couple months, and Milestone does take a few minutes to install, but this particular server is absurd.

The client's IT department just put this server back in action so it is going to be hard for me to tell them this server stinks. I have other servers I can bounce around pretty quickly.

I don't recall off the top of my head if the SQL installation will also be done on the E: drive if you choose to install to a different drive. I should hope so, and I'm fairly sure it does.

But with a 100% full OS drive you can't be surprised by any failures. Windows itself will struggle to stay stable and operational at that point.

I'd recommend clearing some space on the C drive and giving it another go. And I suspect stopping the existing VMS will speed things up greatly.

With a 100% full 3TB OS drive, that's going to be a major reason behind the slow installation process. Any time you have high IO activity on your OS drive, you're going to find everything (including simply launching Windows components like Control Panel) are going to be much slower than normal.

Hi Jay,

In regards to the settings for LPR, the default value of the number of frames that our LPR software analyzes per second is 4fps.  However, that value is adjustable and doesn't mean the camera has to be set to 4fps.  The camera can be set to anything higher than that value.  If the LPR is for a situation where the car has to drive vary slowly (e.g., entering a parking lot or parking garage) or even come to a complete stop (e.g., a parking lot/garage where they have to wait for the arm to raise), then you could easily get away with analyzing fewer frames per second because the car will be in the FOV longer.

You will have to do some "trial and error" because LPR definitely isn't a simple plug-n-play technology.  It takes some tweaking and tuning.  I would recommend reference the LPR second in the administrators manual for whatever XProtect software you are installing.  There is a lot of information in there covering angle of view, pixels on target, shutter speed, etc.

For the SQL Express error you got, it is a fairly generic error from SQL that can mean a number of things from permissions issues, to a setting in SQL that is preventing our software from doing what it needs to do (this could be the case if SQL Express was already installed by a different application and you are trying to reuse that instance), etc.  Installing one VMS on a machine with another VMS almost always causes problems.  If you haven't solved this already, I would suggest opening a case with tech support so they can take a look in the logs to see if there is further information surrounding that error.

Also, as Josh mentioned, the OS drive being full can cause very weird behavior in Windows and can definitely cause things to run incredibly slow.

The two VMSs writing to the same physical disk(s) is only a problem from a performance and hardware longevity perspective. If they're both recording 25 cameras it's similar to one VMS recording 50.

With caveats of course. Different VMSs will have different read/write strategies. Even if both use reasonably efficient strategies individually, they may interfere with each other enough that the resulting IO becomes much more random than if a single VMS was managing the same number of cameras.

 Edit: This is just an educated guess based on limited knowledge. For example, if you had one VMS which can buffer to RAM, and media files are preallocated, it would likely handle 50 cameras more efficiently than if 25 of those cameras were on a different VMS without RAM-based prebuffers or with a different file allocation strategy as the software with lower efficiency will (probably) effectively limit the performance of the other sharing the same disk(s).

We came across another situation from one of our customers where they had two VMSs pointing to the same storage array (Drive Letter) recently.

One of the VMSs assumes that it 'owns' the array, preallocates all the space then marks it 'Read Only'.   The other VMS was also pointed to the same storage, and of course could not write to the array.