Question re: folding and ESXi

J

Jim G

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 2, 2011
Messages
221
Hi guys;

Now that we're settled again I can go back to folding... however! Our new server is running ESXi and I'm still learning the ins and outs of it, so I'm hoping that this one is a no-brainer to someone who knows more than me...

My question is: how do I get folding @ home to utilize the full amount of available CPU horsepower? Setting one vCPU to the VM (Ubuntu Server VM) only seems to use up ~3,300MHz of the available CPU power (E3-1245, >10K total)... I've tried setting 2 and 4 vCPUs and that number hasn't changed. There are 7 other VMs running on the server but there's minimal CPU usage coming from them at this stage - most of them aren't going to be used for a couple of weeks so I thought I'd have some CPU cycles to burn in the meantime... but how do I make use of them?

Any help appreciated.
 
I have had ESXi 4.1 and now ESXi 5 with BOINC for a few months now. There are some drop offs in performance and the more VMs you have the larger the drop off I have noticed.

What I have done that seems to help a little bit is set the priorities of the VM CPU power for each VM and don't over allocate the CPUs in the VM.

I also wouldn't trust the performance or MHz graphs that much. I have an E3-1230 and it shows each core pegged around 50%-60% usage totaling somewhere around 16,000 MHz.

What does your log look like for F@H? Have you tried manually setting the cores? In Ubuntu does it recognize all the cores? You could try BOINC to see if it loads all the cores. That would tell you if its a F@H problem or not or a VM machine problem.
 
Thanks for the reply - I'll check the f@h logs tomorrow... I haven't tried manually setting the cores yet, I was worried about mucking up the other VMs by changing settings before I'd done sufficient googling.

In the VM cat /proc/cpuinfo only shows CPU #0 on VMs with one vCPU and also on the one VM with two vCPUs... Same command on the non-ESXi server shows 0-7 with a similar processor. Something wrong there I'm guessing?
 
Jim G said:
In the VM cat /proc/cpuinfo only shows CPU #0 on VMs with one vCPU and also on the one VM with two vCPUs... Same command on the non-ESXi server shows 0-7 with a similar processor. Something wrong there I'm guessing?
Click to expand...

Yes. It looks like it is not picking up the second vCPU. When you initially created the VM did you specify only one vCPU? Once you install the operating system to the disk you usually can't change the number of vCPU the OS has. Most of the time when I tried to change the vCPU it caused stability problems once the OS has been installed. I would try installing a clean VM with 4 vCPUs on and see if you get better results if you haven't already.
 
IF the OS is Linux you can run
uname -a
if you don't see SMP or smp in the output then that would explain. You would have to change the kernel.

Linux doesn't mind if you change number of cores so long as you started out as with 2 or more.
 
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