Anyone Plotting on ESXi VM’s? Wondering about your experience regarding performance vs running on native OS
I have several older HP G7 servers with enterprise SSD’s and thought about setting up a tiny farming VM and one or more larger plotting VM’s on these servers.
I think the overhead would reduce the plot speed a little bit. Maybe you can passthrough the disks to save speed there?
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Ive got 4x 800Gb enterprise SSD’s in a HW Raid-0 stripe at the host layer.
Since I have 2 machines, ill try one with a Windows install and the second with a Linux VM install and compare performance. Basically, im looking for some kind of HW config to maximize plotting performance. Is there a catalog of successful plotting builds somewhere?
Linux will be faster than windows for plotting due to differences between the windows plotter and the linux plotter. About 10%.
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Ok then, ill just do the linux VM and see how that goes. Thanks for the feedback.
I just did setup a DELL R720XD with ESXi, and one Ubuntu server headless 20.04 vm. Used 3 1TB SSD data in raid 0 for the temp, on the PERC controller, and some HDDs alone on raid 0 (there is no passthrough on the PERC 710 raid controller). I attached the above PERC virtual devices as raw disks to Ubuntu, so there should be no overhead due to the ESXi disk virtualization.
Only downside is that with the free version of ESXi you can only allocate 8 CPUs to each OS. But you can easily launch more VM as explained here.
I have just launched the system and it is now syncing and plotting in parallel. At a first glance the speed it seems pretty much limited by the SSD/HHD speed. Will test with a NVME and compare with the 3 SSDs in raid 0 once it arrives.