Our design validation used a 5-node VxRail cluster for application hosting, and a Dell PowerScale NAS storage device for accumulation and management of video data streamed to a Milestone Systems VMS. Based on recent sizing requests from customers, a common planning ratio for VMS archived streams recorded for historical analysis to "analytics" cameras requiring real-time alerting is approximately 5:1 or 20% real-time. The reason for this ratio is due to the fact that many cameras are static in nature and may not warrant the extra investment required to enable real-time analytics. We simulated a workload with approximately 30% analytics streams to test the upper bounds of typical processing requirements.
- We met our design goals for VMS performance by processing a total of 840 camera streams using 12 recorder VMs.
- We also met our design goal for BriefCam by performing real-time alert processing for 200 camera streams using 4 Alert Processing servers in an application mesh cluster.
- Ipsotek was also able to process 120 camera streams for real-time event alerting using 4 processing VMs.
- All high availability tests produced results consistent with the application and platform expected behavior.
Camera simulators
Due to the nature of testing in a lab environment, it is not always practical to add hundreds or thousands of real cameras to a system during testing. Video camera simulation software is often used for testing safety and security applications, including VMS and computer vision applications. Camera simulation allows system designers to stress test an entire end-to-end CCTV system while controlling complexity and cost. To enable testing we leveraged a camera simulator provided by Milestone Systems. The videos used were encoded as H.264 and wrapped with a Raw (not MP4) container. Enterprise-class video camera simulators allow testers to specify bandwidth requirements, quality, quantity, encoding, and source video files.
The camera simulation system used for testing our design needed to meet the following requirements:
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Camera simulators run on dedicated virtualized computing nodes independent of the VxRail platform.
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The proposed bit rate for all cameras is ~3.2 Mb/s.
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Specific source video files have been used to test the capability of the CV tool features we are targeting.
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Simulators connect and stream directly to the Milestone XProtect VMS using a dedicated network segment (VLAN).
Simulator hardware
All camera simulation was performed on a 2-node ESXi cluster using 2 x 750xa PowerEdge servers. We planned to simulate 840 cameras running on this simulation cluster. Each Simulator VM simulates 70 cameras with specific video files for Face Recognition.
Physical cameras
Our lab hosts a small number of physical cameras for performing selected specialized testing. For this Design validation, we need physical cameras connected to the Milestone Systems recorders that we used for high availability failover testing. Our physical cameras are capable of being redirected to a secondary IP address and port that is needed when a recorder fails whereas most camera simulators do have this feature.