PSA - DIMES is something everyone can run, no impact on other DC'ing

I need to figure out a way to add more HDD ops capacity to my esxi server. Disk activity makes this thing feel so slow.
 
SSD's or some fantastic RAID fibre channel drives would probably work. What do you have now? I'm stuck with standard hard drives and agree the ops really kill when you add multiple VB's. Then again, if you got the RAM to spare, a few VB's in a Ram drive would work pretty good too. lol
 
Gilthanis said:
SSD's or some fantastic RAID fibre channel drives would probably work. What do you have now? I'm stuck with standard hard drives and agree the ops really kill when you add multiple VB's. Then again, if you got the RAM to spare, a few VB's in a Ram drive would work pretty good too. lol
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Currently using laptop drives which are painfully slow. I have a mix of 500gb and 1tb drives but no hardware raid card to tie them together. Thinking about using a 60gb ssd I have laying around, but I'd need to shrink the VM size to 2gb or so to actually fit any on there.
 
I ran into some maxVMs issues last night. Gonna post this here for posterity that's trying to spin up a ton of VMs on older hardware.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1020121

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1168578

explains how to "fix" some of the limits that esxi places on your hardware.

Edit: I was able to spin up 20 agents on an old Operton 175 (dual core) in a supermicro board with 4GB ram. Had to use a 60gb SSD to make storage ops tolerable. Ram is the limiting factor by far. VMs are 2GB hard drive space, 128MB ram. Works really well. I need to make up some kind of VM storage, move it off of local to something on my network.
 
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_r2h said:
I ran into some maxVMs issues last night. Gonna post this here for posterity that's trying to spin up a ton of VMs on older hardware.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1020121

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1168578

explains how to "fix" some of the limits that esxi places on your hardware.

Edit: I was able to spin up 20 agents on an old Operton 175 (dual core) in a supermicro board with 4GB ram. Had to use a 60gb SSD to make storage ops tolerable. Ram is the limiting factor by far. VMs are 2GB hard drive space, 128MB ram. Works really well. I need to make up some kind of VM storage, move it off of local to something on my network.
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this is XP you are using? that would make me VERY nervous to only give the vm 128mb and only 2gb for standard XP install. what service pack is it?

if not standard XP with SP3, disregard my statements :)
 
bigted said:
this is XP you are using? that would make me VERY nervous to only give the vm 128mb and only 2gb for standard XP install. what service pack is it?

if not standard XP with SP3, disregard my statements :)
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I spent the last two days playing with what settings I liked on my VMs. I use to run WinXP on a P3 with 128mb ram back in my younger years. It might occasionally swap but doesn't bother me. As for the 2gb HD, I have about 600mb left.

So far working very well. It's WinXP with SP3, I have done some tweaking to the OS/services to make it as minimal as possible. :D VMTools is also installed on each guest, which if I understand some of the documentation correctly helps with memory management on guests.

4GdHKwq.png


Edit: The guest OS swapping could shorten the life of the SSD, but I already don't trust it as a main drive anyway, so it was basically headed for the garbage heap anyway. Thus my lust over a NAS.
 
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Looks good. I thought about trying miniXP versions to see how they worked out. I also don't know what the minimum SP for XP is necessary for both Java and Dimes. If pre SP1 would work, 128MB ram is more than enough. Just tell XP no to auto updates which I forgot to do on my last DIMES VM box. 4GB just isn't enough without tweaking it a ton.
 
_r2h said:
Ebay and I are fixing that problem =P
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Yeah...I'm finding that in the past I would just load up on old hard drives pulled from recycled PC's, but lately the systems I have been getting from work donations only have one HD slot (slim line Optiplex systems). So, instead of having a ton of VM's on one drive, I may setup a few older cases with a dual core in it and see how many I can get rolling using 4 or more drives. But, I don't have any idea when I will find the time to do that. My daughter and wife only allows about a half hour of play time each day. The rest I have to do over the internet from work. And even then, I got to do it on free time. ;)
 
Gilthanis said:
Yeah...I'm finding that in the past I would just load up on old hard drives pulled from recycled PC's, but lately the systems I have been getting from work donations only have one HD slot (slim line Optiplex systems). So, instead of having a ton of VM's on one drive, I may setup a few older cases with a dual core in it and see how many I can get rolling using 4 or more drives. But, I don't have any idea when I will find the time to do that. My daughter and wife only allows about a half hour of play time each day. The rest I have to do over the internet from work. And even then, I got to do it on free time. ;)
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i'm in the same boat as far as the time thing.

also welcome to tjmagneto in the dimes world!
 
That brings us up to 13 active members. Great to see the progress. I was able to borg another single core sempron over the weekend. Not much for heavy crunching, but it works just fine on DIMES. :)
 
Gilthanis said:
I think we lost Grandpa... Quick someone wake him up! :D
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Naaah Just trying to figure out how to run 20 XP VM's with dimes 10 instances of Roseta and 1 GPUGrid all at 1 time on a 980X. It kind of brings Linux to a crawl when you do that. it tends to use lots of resources I plan on adding another 12GB of ram soon and try again. With all the things I listed above the useage was.

CPU 100%
Memory all 12GB + 3.6GB of swap
Network usage between 8Mbps and 13MBps continues
it kind of made Linux Crawl so I had to give something up :eek:
 
Just take your time, Grandpa....don't pay any attention to what is happening behind you.....
 
Ohhh I see the trim coming but I do not think I will be able to stop it at this time. :(
 
I have to tweak a few of mine down too. I just don't have the time to babysit. I will just continue to borg as I can and hopefully not get mowed too bad when you guys get back up to full speed. ;)
 
Now that I bounce my dimes clients every day via a scheduled task and a batch script, I am pretty much maintenance-free and loving it!
 
My esxi box's hdd took a dump. Put a one terabyte hdd in it and am slowly bringing vms back. Nice having a pretty fast hdd compared to the sata1 that I was using.
 
just made top 100 users overall. where my shades at? oh here they are :cool:
 
Yeah...I'm gonna have to pull something out of my rear if I hope to see number 1 on the team before getting mowed....
 
_r2h said:
Jeeze almost 200 agents. :D
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You'll note how many of them are inactive as well. Had a hdd crash that was hosting almost 70 and another machine that had over 20 was repurposed.

I wish I could reuse agent names...
 
You can reuse agent names. When you install a new client, choose the option that says you already installed on this computer...I believe the third option. Then on the next screen I believe it gives the option to choose which client it was. The next screen will confirm you want to re-use that name. The only issue I see is if you change the name afterwards, Free-DC thinks it is a different device.

11th picture in the guide show where you choose that it was already installed on that device... http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1768712
 
bigted said:
You'll note how many of them are inactive as well. Had a hdd crash that was hosting almost 70 and another machine that had over 20 was repurposed.

I wish I could reuse agent names...
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Ummm you can :D

I have done it twice now just choose I have had dimes on this computer before then choose 1 of the inactive names from before it will flash a warning up about the client not being uninstalled, just tell it to use the name anyway.
 
Grandpa_01 said:
Ummm you can :D

I have done it twice now just choose I have had dimes on this computer before then choose 1 of the inactive names from before it will flash a warning up about the client not being uninstalled, just tell it to use the name anyway.
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To be fair, it took me a while to figure this option out as well.
 
yeah, i obviously didn't explore the options for installer too much, was just faster when re-doing 60 machines.
 
Hey guys, we might even make top 10 by the end of the year
 
so i did the installed already dealy, chose an agent that hasn't been active and finished the install. when i went to configuration, the team wasn't set. is this normal? would have been nice to avoid typing out [H]ard|OCP, but oh well, i'll suffer through it :D
 
bigted said:
so i did the installed already dealy, chose an agent that hasn't been active and finished the install. when i went to configuration, the team wasn't set. is this normal? would have been nice to avoid typing out [H]ard|OCP, but oh well, i'll suffer through it :D
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That is what I saw the one time I did this - agent name stuck, but no team specified. Set the team, and you should be set.
 
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