On 02/05/2014 07:01 PM, Les Mikesell wrote: > You could spend your budget on IP cameras and not need to worry about > hardware connections or where the server sits. If your old system > works with IP cameras you could probably use the same approach - run > it under an OS that works in a VM somewhere and treat it like an > appliance. > The caution with IP cameras and zoneminder together is the significant increase in CPU load due to zm's transcoding, with MJPEG cameras in particular. I'm running a zm here with a few older IP cams on VMware ESX and had to drop the framerate each time I added a camera due to the CPU load. And the load of just storing the individual JPEG files is pretty significant if you record.