Who can give me ESXi experiences and thoughts ??

[OldChap]

I am not even sure I fully understand what a hypervisor is but I think this may be what I am looking for to run on my daily rig.

Just now I am thinking it is somewhat like running vmware but on the bare machine rather than within an OS.

So, boys and girls, why would I want this ??

[D_A]

A hypervisor is sort of like a replacement OS and virtualisation layer in one.
You install the hypervisor first, then allocate additional virtual machines for each OS you install. The hypervisor itself is extremely light weight and only concerned with managing the virtual machines, as a result you can get very close to "bare metal" performance from your VMs. The hypervisor management applications all run in a VM themselves (with special permissions) to keep the virtualisation layer as thin as possible.
Depending on the features of your chosen hypervisor you can even have one VM thinking it was on an Intel machine and another thinking it's on AMD, both on the same physical hardware. Aside from folks doing development work I don't see much application for that, but it's possible. Putting extra translation overhead between the VM and hardware also slows things down.

[PoppaGeek]

Thanks D_A but I got this.

[D_A]

I do hope so, PG but I'd like to learn what you have to offer as well.
Really. I know there's always more to learn, virtualisation is no different.

[Buckeye]

Can the VM's make use of all motherboard features & graphic cards ?

I know I had problems with that running VMWorkstation.
Like using a Nvidia Graphics card from a VM.

[PoppaGeek]

I do hope so, PG but I'd like to learn what you have to offer as well.
Really. I know there's always more to learn, virtualisation is no different.

lol that WAS my offer.


I never looked into hypervisor stuff so i was the student here. It was an interesting read too.

[skycrane]

The question id like to know is can you run boinc in ESXi? specificly with the vbox to run the scientific app?

[D_A]

Can the VM's make use of all motherboard features & graphic cards ?

I know I had problems with that running VMWorkstation.
Like using a Nvidia Graphics card from a VM.

Some are better than others at varying things, but I wouldn't be surprised if you could only run one VM that used the full features of a modern graphics card at a time. Limited resources and all that.

lol that WAS my offer.


I never looked into hypervisor stuff so i was the student here. It was an interesting read too.

I'm surprised. I thought you'd have run into it before now. Whole data-centres are completely virtualised these days with the hardware becoming almost irrelevant and new VMs/instances being spawned and removed automatically depending on either/or processor, user or network load.
My wife's work, a non-identified government department (which is way more boring than that makes it sound) has all the user deskops hosted in a private cloud including applications and data. Each one is spawned when they log in and destroyed when they log out. Only the data is persistent and they can log into their own desktop from any machine in any office in the country. It kind of harks back to the days when you logged into a central mainframe via a terminal in a way.

[D_A]

The question id like to know is can you run boinc in ESXi? specificly with the vbox to run the scientific app?

I see no reason why not. You'd install BOINC in your client OS just as though it was running on bare metal. The catch is that virtualisation doesn't create system resources, it divides them, so adding more running client OSs would just soak up more of your limited resources. It would be useful for comparing a system in Linux (and various distros) vs Windows output etc, or chopping and changing between various OSs for various different reasons.

[PoppaGeek]

Actually I have just the hypervisor did not ring a bell. I toyed with the idea of using Openstack on my farm. Mostly out of boredom and wanting to learn something new but also wanted to see if using this could reduce hardware needs like storage and networking and make it easier to manage. Do not remember why I did not pursue it.

[Buckeye]

Thanks D_A, that's what I thought.

I am in the process of setting up a large VM system for benchmarking and wanted to use my main rig as it is now, but also use VM's for the testing part. I still need more hardware to complete everything so just planning things out now.

I looked at Workstation 10 for this but the Hypervisor sounded interesting also.

[D_A]

I'm currently mulling over setting up a Xen system across a local cluster ... for , giggles and a uni project (I suppose that kills of the s and giggles part though, dunnit).
I have cluster software, but it would be good to include the virtualisation part of the course as well if I can. Still thinking about all this.

[Mumak]

When you run a VM, there's a huge performance penalty in case the software performs system calls. This results in excessive calls to hypervisor (VMEXIT). Each new CPU generation brings improvements for virtualization technologies (paging, interrupts, I/O, etc), so the later the CPU is, the better performance you can expect.

[Buckeye]

When you run a VM, there's a huge performance penalty in case the software performs system calls. This results in excessive calls to hypervisor (VMEXIT). Each new CPU generation brings improvements for virtualization technologies (paging, interrupts, I/O, etc), so the later the CPU is, the better performance you can expect.

Yes as expected, this is why I want to do VM testing.

It's better to keep my main rig separate from all that except for controlling things.

[MadMike261]

Can the VM's make use of all motherboard features & graphic cards ?

I know I had problems with that running VMWorkstation.
Like using a Nvidia Graphics card from a VM.

If you have supported CPU (VT-d on the intel side, if I recall correctly) you can give certain hardware directly to a VM.
Not sure if your other hardware needs to support it aswell.

I use this on my ESXi box to pass my Disk Controller directly to my NAS VM. Meaning ESXi can't even see the disks connected to the controller.
But it also means no other VM can use it.

YMMV though when doing this with stuff like Graphics Cards...

@OC,
Why would you want to run this on your daily driver?
Stuff like VMWare Workstation (or Hyper-V in Win 8) is most generally more suited.

[Buckeye]

@OC,
Why would you want to run this on your daily driver?
Stuff like VMWare Workstation (or Hyper-V in Win 8) is most generally more suited.

Agreed on the VW Workstation. The other question for me is limited machines atm.

[OldChap]

MadMike: I guess you could say I am in an experimental mood. My thought was to have one machine (currently 8c/16t + 16gb) with win7, Linux Mint and PfSense on it. I think the oddball here is the latter as rather in the same manner as MM I still rely on Windows for some things. I prefer to run crunching and crawling on Linux. and I begrudge paying the xtra running cost of another machine just for pfsense. If I could share resources on one rig and have the further ability to try new things in isolation from the same machine..... I made my crunchers as efficient as possible, maybe I can achieve something better here too.

Much as I like the Asus AC Router, I dislike the interface and as I have a lot to learn about networking etc. I feel I need to run pfsense to make progress.

There are other possibilities and combinations that could work for me too such as putting crawling and pfsense on a single rig.

Do VW Make workstations Bill?

[Buckeye]

LOL Mike.

Its the VM Workstation software

[MadMike261]

Why not run Linux Mint on the hardware and make use of Virtual Box to create a PfSense and Windows VM?
Virtual Box is the open source version of VMware Workstation, haven't used it for a few years, but it used to be a good (and free) alternative to VMWare Workstation.

edit: spelling

[OldChap]

I have done that the other way around putting mint on windows with VB... I just wondered if I would get anything extra from using ESXi really. If having a software agnostic layer would be somehow advantageous.

[PoppaGeek]

pfsense will run on a Pentium 2 with 256 meg ram. I had a 486 the size of a lunch box that had been a Point Of Sale terminal. Paid $5 for it and ran FreeBSD as a firewall and router for a long time. No noise, no heat very little electric.

As an aside if you have a dedicated firewall with a *BSD on it you can easily run a packet sniffer on it and using deep packet inspection can see absolutely everything on your net in and out. Use a decent hard drive and once a week do focused searches to see what is up on the home network. Might surprise ya. Encrypted traffic the exception.

Any way give pfsense a box of it's own. A nice project for one of those mini-ITX boards.

[OldChap]

Maybe that is why I dislike the Asus' interface.... I ran pfsense for a couple of years on an amd 5050e rig (too big and bulky) with Intel NIC's.

[skycrane]

the reason im looking into it, is i can only run 4-5 VM on my 16c 32gb server... the Test4Theory boinc only lets one instance run per comp. and i want to run more
id like to run 15 instaces of it, one on each core, and leave the last one for any overhead.
for the boinc, it runs Vbox inside to do the calculations

unless anyone knows another way to run more than one instance of boinc on a rig?

[PoppaGeek]

I went to the Test4Theory forums and did some reading.

1. Tech said that "only one instance" of bionic was by Default so as to limit use of system resources. That would imply to me there is a non-default way to do so.

2. How is something running in a VM visible, by default, to another VM? How would one know the other exists? I thought anything in a VM was partitioned off to the rest of the system.

[s0lid]

Why not run Linux Mint on the hardware and make use of Virtual Box to create a PfSense and Windows VM?
Virtual Box is the open source version of VMware Workstation, haven't used it for a few years, but it used to be a good (and free) alternative to VMWare Workstation.

edit: spelling

Why not run any Linux with Kernel enabled virtualization :P?
KVM/XEN/QEMU, pretty much does the same thing but on the kernel level and you don't have to keep the virtualbox open all the time, it'll run as a daemon and you can control to the VM with platform specific tool.