ZoneMinder Forums

It seems that fairly often users inquire about hardware requirements for xxx many cameras at yyy resolution and framerate. Sometimes what they are after would call for multiple CPUs, GBs of RAM, RAID harddrive setups, etc.

I'm thinking that a good alternative approach is the "cluster" concept. Here in the US, I can put together a ZM box that will handle four cameras nicely for $500 or so. Suppose I want to design a system for 20 cameras for a five floor office building. Rather than assemble a "SuperZMbox" and route all the video cables to one location, I would choose to put a server on each floor. This approach has the advantage that a hardware failure will not bring down all 20 cameras.

If we had an interface that would integrate multiple ZM servers, such a cluster sytem would scale beautifully. A simplified user interface would not need to include admin functions , as these could be done using the regular ZM console on each server.

Ross

i have to do something very similar.
and i wass thinking on a machine thats handle the mysql server and the webpage and bouild dummy machines with the cctv cards.
ofcouce have to share the captures dirs.
that will be easy since the first time i use zm the mysql server was on my win2000 server. since i cant get it run on linux.

Zoneminder can do this already I beleive without changing much!

The only thing you need to do is change the startup (zmpkg zmdc) scripts to only run the monitors that on on each host. Or this can be done by making sure that ssh is used to start capture / analyse on the remote hosts. Ssh should use certificates to authenticate non-interactivly.

And to make this a cluster just make sure that the mysql databases have replication to eachother and that in turn is monitored. I don't know how if we have a single point of failure here, I would have to look into it.

Also have a centralised NFS filesystem. The other PC's could be diskless. My friend in Australia Ken Yap, made Etherboot to do just this. So knock off another 100 bucks of your other systems.

If you want to include storage in each computer, do that and use something Like CODA distributed filesystem, or if your Windows - DFS.

Just mount and export the zmdisk/events/[monitor number] for local PC's monitors. On the host that will provide the web interface, make sure it mounts all the other network drives.

I suggested this a short time ago and have a few ideas of how to make it work, some of which are parallel to talllmc's. I would definitely need the events stored locally on each machine though, for the sheer number of drives that would be needed in each machine. (I have 4, 250 gig drives RAIDed for the one server I have in place.)

Here's a link to the thread I posted - the bottom few posts deal with this feature:
http://www.zoneminder.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3906