Hi, I want to get Frigate installed on DELL Optiplex 3020. Given its a Intel Gen4 i5, I suspect I would be asking too much if I installed it on a VM that is running on Proxmox? From the Frigate website “Frigate runs best with Docker installed on bare metal Debian-based distributions. For ideal performance, Frigate needs low overhead access to underlying hardware for the Coral and GPU devices. Running Frigate in a VM on top of Proxmox, ESXi, Virtualbox, etc. is not recommended though some users have had success with Proxmox.”. Anyone had any luck getting it up and running on a VM?
You can passthru the GPU hardware to a qemu VM on proxmox. Proxmox itself will not get in your way, because proxmox is just an administative helper for qemu there. The setup for this passthru is a qemu thing.
I don’t know if the same kind of passthru is possible to a docker container.
Pass thru is in fact possible in docker. The example compose for Frigate has an entry that specifically passes the Coral device through to the container. I use this exact setup. Also, docker is not a VM
You’re just moving all the transcoding from the GPU to the CPU. If you can get Quick Sync working, and you use h264, that’s fine. If not, you’re eating into your CPU.
It should be fine. You can pass the hardware devices like GPU directly to the VM.
Looks like I have two options for Proxmox + Frigate:
a) full VM via a QEMU VM that then has Frigate as app container (Frigate website is not recommending this approach from what I understand)
b) Virtual environment (VE) thgrough the “Proxmox Container Toolkit” where Frigate is as a system container (i.e. docker container directly in the Proxmox environment, which eliminates the VM overhead. See here: https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#chapter_pct
Looks like someone has got it up and running in the PCT environment https://www.homeautomationguy.io/blog/running-frigate-on-proxmox
Also, I need to get my hands on a Micro desktop with a PCIe slot so that I can stick the Coral unit in it. Any thoughts for cheap solutions on eBay?
“VE” is just the product name of Proxmox’s virtual machine platform, afaik it’s not a technology you can use “in proxmox”. PVE always uses QEMU-KVM virtual machines when it manages a virtual machine.
The other thing PVE can manage is LXC containers.
I haven’t used the LXC part of PVE yet, but frigate it runs relatively fine on CPU here in a VM, as I don’t have devices useful for acceleration. But if you are ready to delve into LXC that could be better performance-wise.