CPU mining requesting guidance

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shyguy

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Dec 8, 2017
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Hello,

Fairly new to the mining aspect of cryptocurrency so please bear with me.

I currently have excess servers (3) in my data center which i'm looking to utilize for Monero/Aeon mining but i'm not sure where to start. I currently have ESXi 5.5 installed on each server with multiple virtual machines deployed.

q1: Can I mine from VMs running on the ESXi server?
q2: Is it better to install a Windows/Linux OS directly on the server and mine that way?
q3: With the configuration/hardware I have, should I consider sole mining?

Server configuration;
One server has 2 processors, each Processor has the following
Intel Xeon X5690
CPU Stepping: 2
Speed: 3.466 GHz
Number of Threads: 12
Number of Cores: 6
=================
Total Memory (MB): 196608

Thank you in advance, any information is much appreciated.
 

markarr

Active Member
Oct 31, 2013
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1 . you can but it comes with some quirks. You will need to pin the vm to cores so the scheduler does not move the miner around. If you have other vms your not going to want to use all the cores as your other vms will suffer greatly.
2. It will mine better with using the os. The simplest way to do it is to do docker and use an image setup already.
3. That configuration will do ~1400 on Aeon running two docker containers using 6 theads on each cpu. The cpu only only has 12mb of cache so you should only do 6 mining threads per cpu.
 

shyguy

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Dec 8, 2017
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The ESXi host will only be used for mining no other VMs will be running on it.

I'm in the process of installing windows directly on the host as we speak. I'm not familiar with the docker configuration. do you recommend any how to guides? You think it's better to mine AEON or Monero?
 

markarr

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Oct 31, 2013
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If your not doing anything else with the hardware i would not do esxi. There is xmrig stack out there that will mine either xmr or aeon that will run on windows.
 

Iaroslav

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Aug 23, 2017
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Do you really need Windows? All is very easy to run on Ubuntu - plain install, few commands to run xmr-stak from docker (for your setup it's even better in a swarm mode) - and that's it. You may go with XMR, AEON or even ETN now.
 
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shyguy

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Dec 8, 2017
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Hmm Interesting, yeah I don't need Windows - i was just going to try a diff. OS on each server and see what works best. I'm re-imaging now. Recommend any guides/links to follow?

+ these are Cisco B200 M2 blades
 
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Iaroslav

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Aug 23, 2017
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You can find it all on STH in a few topics, but here you go with a quick man:

On clean Ubuntu run:
Code:
wget -qO- https://get.docker.com/ | sh
sudo sysctl -w vm.nr_hugepages=128 && ulimit -l 262144
And then xmr-stak for a 12Mb L3 CPU (better in screen, as for me):
Code:
docker run -it -e WALLET_ADDRESS='your_wallet' -e POOL_PASSWORD='x' -e POOL_ADDRESS='pool.minexmr.com:7777' -e AUTO_THREAD_CONFIG=false -e THREAD_CONFIG='{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 0 },{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 1 },{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 2 },{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 3 },{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 4 },{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 5 },{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 6 },{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 7 },{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 8 },{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 9 },{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 10 },{ "low_power_mode" : false, "no_prefetch" : true, "affine_to_cpu" : 11 }' --name xmr-stak-cpu timonmat/xmr-stak-cpu

Swarm mode can be run like this
On nitiator (put your IP), as a result you'll get the token for your slave nodes:
Code:
docker swarm init --advertise-addr 192.168.1.145
On slave nodes:
Code:
docker swarm join --token your_token 192.168.1.145:2377
Back to initiator:
Code:
docker service create --mode global --name miner -e WALLET_ADDRESS='your_wallet' -e POOL_PASSWORD='x' -e POOL_ADDRESS='pool.minexmr.com:7777' -e AUTO_THREAD_CONFIG.....
Stopping service:
Code:
docker service rm miner
and for single mode:
Code:
docker stop xmr-stak-cpu
Don't use one swarm if mixing CPU's with different L3 size. Hope it was helpful!
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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You can also use Portainer if you want a GUI for what laroslav said.

Of course, if you are CPU mining, we have xmrig setup for our private pool and AEON which will be several times more profitable than Monero. Just add wallet address and tell it what cores to run in docker and you are set. It defaults the pool address/ ports.
 
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