[20 Bitcoins bounty] For instructions on how to install ATI 58XX drivers on ESXi

[DavinciJ15]

Hi,

To be CRYSTAL clear I do not want to mine inside a virtual machine!
To be CRYSTAL clear I do not want to mine inside a virtual machine!
To be CRYSTAL clear I do not want to mine inside a virtual machine!

I want to do mining on ESXi v4.1 because I want to reuse the box for Windows Servers that do not require graphics cards.  I would use Hyper-V BUT each CPUs is running at 100% per GPU.   This is a bug in the windows Video drivers not sure if it's fixed in v11.6 of the graphics drivers yet (have not tested it) but I love VMWare's vSphere client software so even if it works I would rather use ESXi.  

Anyhow if someone can layout how to install it and get it working so I can mine on ESXi it's worth some bitcoins!
Who knows you may even start a craze of server managers installing Graphics cards in their servers to mine for bitcoins or namecoin or whatever.

Thanks in advance

Davinci

[1714799022]

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[wndrbr3d]

The only way this might be possible is if you're running ESXi 4.0 and your hardware platform supports VT-d extensions.

Check out this thread on the VMWare community forums, as it might point you in the right direction:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1781153?tstart=0

Basically, VT-d and VMDirectPath are your only hope here.

Cheers! 

PS - More reading if you're interested:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/02/24/step-by-step-guide-on-how-to-enable-vt-d-and-perform-direct-device-assignment/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOMMU

[fcmatt]

You are probably going to want to dig into VMdirectpath.

http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/esx40_vmdirectpath_whitebox_HCL.php#Devices

[jdebunt]

as quoted on http://networkingbunny.co.uk/documents/vmdirectpath :

Remember with ESXi you are always going to need a way of running the vSphere Client to manage it, now once running you may be able to live with running vSphere inside a guest for managing other guests. However for set up and when you need to alter your "desktop" guest you're going to need it on another machine.

Once (or before) ESXi is installed you need to go into the BIOS of your computer and ensure that the required extension is enabled (VT-d or IOMMU), wthout this ESXi will not be able to pass hardware through. If your platform supports it and is enabled you should now be able to go into the "Configuration -> Advanced Settings" section of vSphere Client.

Clicking "Edit" will provide you with a list of PCI/PCIe devices ESXi believes it can provide guests. You need to select the device which represents your graphics card. In my case it appears as "ATI Technologies Inc Optiplex 755" for one of my cards, then you'll need to attempt to match your USB controllers on the BUS to your physical USB ports. In my case I have two USB 2.0 controllers amongst six other USB 1.0 controllers, the difference of which is documented in the motherboard manual.

Unfortunately you will need to reboot the ESXi host in order to activate the passthrough configuration. I'm unaware if selecting all devices as possible passthrough options will cause you any issues, I specifically took the time to only make those required available.

[DavinciJ15]

as quoted on http://networkingbunny.co.uk/documents/vmdirectpath :

Remember with ESXi you are always going to need a way of running the vSphere Client to manage it, now once running you may be able to live with running vSphere inside a guest for managing other guests. However for set up and when you need to alter your "desktop" guest you're going to need it on another machine.

Once (or before) ESXi is installed you need to go into the BIOS of your computer and ensure that the required extension is enabled (VT-d or IOMMU), wthout this ESXi will not be able to pass hardware through. If your platform supports it and is enabled you should now be able to go into the "Configuration -> Advanced Settings" section of vSphere Client.

Clicking "Edit" will provide you with a list of PCI/PCIe devices ESXi believes it can provide guests. You need to select the device which represents your graphics card. In my case it appears as "ATI Technologies Inc Optiplex 755" for one of my cards, then you'll need to attempt to match your USB controllers on the BUS to your physical USB ports. In my case I have two USB 2.0 controllers amongst six other USB 1.0 controllers, the difference of which is documented in the motherboard manual.

Unfortunately you will need to reboot the ESXi host in order to activate the passthrough configuration. I'm unaware if selecting all devices as possible passthrough options will cause you any issues, I specifically took the time to only make those required available.

Please understand I DO NOT want to mine inside of a guest OS.

[wndrbr3d]

Please understand I DO NOT want to mine inside of a guest OS.

Then you're hosed.

[DarkMatter]

I don't really think you can do what you are willing to.
Mining with the host under ESXi? naaaaaa
You need hardware drivers loaded, python and plenty of packages not available for a "busybox" install...

[Keninishna]

the thing is the vm console is now virtulized as well and boots directly to the kernel as of 4.0 I believe so your only choice is to mine inside a guest os or go with an earlier version. As far as drivers go your not going to get ATI drivers to install as they are not supported inside the esxi console. Hacking the drivers in is hard from what I've heard.

[jdebunt]

Please understand I DO NOT want to mine inside of a guest OS.

then i can't help you any further on this i'm afraid but good luck trying! i hope it works out for you

[fcmatt]

just use the 20 btc to buy a new cheap rig to put the cards in i guess.

[DarkMatter]

the thing is the vm console is now virtulized as well and boots directly to the kernel as of 4.0 I believe so your only choice is to mine inside a guest os or go with an earlier version. As far as drivers go your not going to get ATI drivers to install as they are not supported inside the esxi console. Hacking the drivers in is hard from what I've heard.

You can enable ssh, and log into the physical os.

[DavinciJ15]

The only way this might be possible is if you're running ESXi 4.0 and your hardware platform supports VT-d extensions.

Check out this thread on the VMWare community forums, as it might point you in the right direction:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1781153?tstart=0

Basically, VT-d and VMDirectPath are your only hope here.

Cheers! 

PS - More reading if you're interested:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/02/24/step-by-step-guide-on-how-to-enable-vt-d-and-perform-direct-device-assignment/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOMMU

That sucks if its the only way!  I thought Linux was able to do anything with the right package installed.

[DavinciJ15]

Please understand I DO NOT want to mine inside of a guest OS.

Then you're hosed.

Thanks I guess I am SOL.  Maybe if I up the bounty?

[NetTecture]

Maybe if I up the bounty?

This is a really good idea. Upping he bounty will change reality.

Dude, ESX is not a generic operating system - it is a closed image to run a hypervisor. Nothing else.

[chiropteran]

Why not just use linux with XEN?  Mining on linux is pretty straightforward, you would just have to adjust to XEN instead of ESXi for your virtualization.

http://www.xen.org/

[DavinciJ15]

Maybe if I up the bounty?

This is a really good idea. Upping he bounty will change reality.

Dude, ESX is not a generic operating system - it is a closed image to run a hypervisor. Nothing else.

So Is HyperV but I am mining using that hypervisor...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5AgoL2T-xk
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9679.0

[DavinciJ15]

Why not just use linux with XEN?  Mining on linux is pretty straightforward, you would just have to adjust to XEN instead of ESXi for your virtualization.

http://www.xen.org/

Good idea.  However I want to leverage my skills on ESXi and all the support behind it.

[Freakin]

0 chance of this working on ESXi.  It *may* be possible on ESX with a lot of work.

ESXi is not Linux.

[film2240]

Hi,

To be CRYSTAL clear I do not want to mine inside a virtual machine!
To be CRYSTAL clear I do not want to mine inside a virtual machine!
To be CRYSTAL clear I do not want to mine inside a virtual machine!

I want to do mining on ESXi v4.1 because I want to reuse the box for Windows Servers that do not require graphics cards.  I would use Hyper-V BUT each CPUs is running at 100% per GPU.   This is a bug in the windows Video drivers not sure if it's fixed in v11.6 of the graphics drivers yet (have not tested it) but I love VMWare's vSphere client software so even if it works I would rather use ESXi.  

Anyhow if someone can layout how to install it and get it working so I can mine on ESXi it's worth some bitcoins!
Who knows you may even start a craze of server managers installing Graphics cards in their servers to mine for bitcoins or namecoin or whatever.

Thanks in advance

Davinci

What is ESXi? A piece of specialist mining hardware,like those FPGA devices i heard about fro hte bitoin mining hardware comparison wiki?

[FreeJAC]

ESXi = VMWARE virtualization platform.

[shakaru]

ESXi = VMWARE virtualization platform.

Yeah, I dont know what your trying to do here. Your asking to not use a platform........for that platform. I have about 3 people here with varrious levels of academia between all and we are sorry. What you are asking is not possible. You state that you want to pay someone 20btc. Just buy your self a rig.

[shotgun]

I manage a bunch of ESX and ESXi clusters. What the OP wants to do is... for lack of a better word, useless. If you have GPU cards in a server/workstation then you should just install LinuxCoin on that box and run your miners. Installing ESX/i doesn't give you any benefit, even if it were possible to get the drivers to work with the GPUs, because the whole point of ESX is to virtualize hardware. Since by definition you cannot virtualize GPU resources, and even then miners use 100% of the GPU resources anyway, there's NO REASON TO USE VIRTUALIZATION TO MINE.

[Keninishna]

I manage a bunch of ESX and ESXi clusters. What the OP wants to do is... for lack of a better word, useless. If you have GPU cards in a server/workstation then you should just install LinuxCoin on that box and run your miners. Installing ESX/i doesn't give you any benefit, even if it were possible to get the drivers to work with the GPUs, because the whole point of ESX is to virtualize hardware. Since by definition you cannot virtualize GPU resources, and even then miners use 100% of the GPU resources anyway, there's NO REASON TO USE VIRTUALIZATION TO MINE.

Who cares about his reasons? Theres a 20 BTC bounty!

[nemo]

Who cares about his reasons? Theres a 20 BTC bounty!

More than 20.

Thanks I guess I am SOL.  Maybe if I up the bounty?

[padrino]

I manage a bunch of ESX and ESXi clusters. What the OP wants to do is... for lack of a better word, useless. If you have GPU cards in a server/workstation then you should just install LinuxCoin on that box and run your miners. Installing ESX/i doesn't give you any benefit, even if it were possible to get the drivers to work with the GPUs, because the whole point of ESX is to virtualize hardware. Since by definition you cannot virtualize GPU resources, and even then miners use 100% of the GPU resources anyway, there's NO REASON TO USE VIRTUALIZATION TO MINE.

Let's step through the BS in your post

1. "useless"? I have numerous VMs across multiple ESXi systems and need to keep them running, that is high power readily available hardware prime for GPUs. I need to keep ESXi running so why wouldn't I try and leverage the hardware on hand and do what the OP is looking to do.

2. You can virtualize GPU resources at varying levels between hypervisors however at this time not OpenCL. In this case pass that GPU directly to the VM itself using VT-d or IOMMU letting the VM execute whatever it wants on the GPU.

break break...

To address the OPs question, I have a couple of ESXi systems myself and was thinking the same thing since it's hardware. The primary issue is the stack of software you need to talk to the card, one can hack some packages into ESXi but you need X windows running with the fglrx driver. That requirement means you will need a large stack of packages to get it moving and would need to start hacking in a big way, start by researching whether or not it's even possible to get X running on ESXi itself.

Sadly my ESXi systems do not support VT-d/IOMMU or I would install my GPUs, map them to a VM and run my miners there.

[drgr33n]

Let me get this strait. You want to mine on your esxi server while the server is running other virtual machines ? 

If so PM me I could do with £200 and could help you out

[blumpkinpie76]

I say its theoretically possible, but would require extremely major modification of both ESXi and the fglrx drivers, so not something you could just make some instructions for. I am curious as to why you would want to do this. I am also missing the connection to reusing the server for headless Windows server.

I would think it would take a professional coder much more than 20 BTC worth of time to complete a project of this magnitude, even at the all time high BTC/USD exchange rate.

I do, however, like your thinking because sometimes it is unconventional ideas like this that spur innovationa and development.

BTW, are you the guy with the youtube videos about silver?

[nebiki]

Who knows you may even start a craze of server managers installing Graphics cards in their servers to mine for bitcoins or namecoin or whatever.

aren't servers usually 2U? a graphics card won't fit in these.

[drgr33n]

I say its theoretically possible, but would require extremely major modification of both ESXi and the fglrx drivers, so not something you could just make some instructions for. I am curious as to why you would want to do this. I am also missing the connection to reusing the server for headless Windows server.

I would think it would take a professional coder much more than 20 BTC worth of time to complete a project of this magnitude, even at the all time high BTC/USD exchange rate.

I do, however, like your thinking because sometimes it is unconventional ideas like this that spur innovationa and development.

BTW, are you the guy with the youtube videos about silver?

Why would you have to mod the fglrx drivers ?

[Capitan]

Your problem is that you for some reason are stuck on using ESXi. You have a few options.

1. I read somewhere that Windows only uses 100% CPU under certain SDK/driver versions. So if you can find the driver version that doesn't use 100% CPU for mining, you can run windows as the host OS and mine there, and still instlal your guest VM's.
2. Linux doesn't have the problem of 100% CPU use during mining. SO you can use linux as your host OS, mine from there, and install VMWare or some other VM software, and run your guest VM's from that.

[drgr33n]

Your problem is that you for some reason are stuck on using ESXi. You have a few options.

1. I read somewhere that Windows only uses 100% CPU under certain SDK/driver versions. So if you can find the driver version that doesn't use 100% CPU for mining, you can run windows as the host OS and mine there, and still instlal your guest VM's.
2. Linux doesn't have the problem of 100% CPU use during mining. SO you can use linux as your host OS, mine from there, and install VMWare or some other VM software, and run your guest VM's from that.

ESXI is a OS not a installable exe. This guy wants to run his ESXI server as normal but cram it with GPGPU's and mine while it's sitting there acting as a server. Well so I can make out. I'd use VMDirectPath to connect the GPGPU's to a linuxcoin machine and mine from that.

[carbonc]

I would probably not recommend doing this if they are Production VM's.  You risk slowing down those VM's because the mining software not only uses GPU but also some CPU cycles...  
I would seriously think twice about this if this is a production system your about to screw with...
people get fired for stealing resources.

[drgr33n]

I would probably not recommend doing this if they are Production VM's.  You risk slowing down those VM's because the mining software not only uses GPU but also some CPU cycles...  
I would seriously think twice about this if this is a production system your about to screw with...
people get fired for stealing resources.

Don't think it would affect the performance at all linuxcoin hardly touches the CPU. But I do agree with you if this is not your server you would be playing with fire I think your boss might have something to say when your rack gets about 70C hotter and about 3 times more noisy Unless you could convince him that its a good idea and try to bribe him with a cut hahaha

[Capitan]

Your problem is that you for some reason are stuck on using ESXi. You have a few options.

1. I read somewhere that Windows only uses 100% CPU under certain SDK/driver versions. So if you can find the driver version that doesn't use 100% CPU for mining, you can run windows as the host OS and mine there, and still instlal your guest VM's.
2. Linux doesn't have the problem of 100% CPU use during mining. SO you can use linux as your host OS, mine from there, and install VMWare or some other VM software, and run your guest VM's from that.

ESXI is a OS not a installable exe. This guy wants to run his ESXI server as normal but cram it with GPGPU's and mine while it's sitting there acting as a server. Well so I can make out. I'd use VMDirectPath to connect the GPGPU's to a linuxcoin machine and mine from that.

Well in his OP he said the reason he didn't want to run windows as a the host OS was because it uses a  lot of CPU. I got the impression that's why he wanted to run ESXi as the host OS. Am I wrong, or was it simply a thinly veiled attempt at making the post not look like a blatant attempt to run mining on someone else's server? His company's server, a server of a client of his company?

[DavinciJ15]

I manage a bunch of ESX and ESXi clusters. What the OP wants to do is... for lack of a better word, useless. If you have GPU cards in a server/workstation then you should just install LinuxCoin on that box and run your miners. Installing ESX/i doesn't give you any benefit, even if it were possible to get the drivers to work with the GPUs, because the whole point of ESX is to virtualize hardware. Since by definition you cannot virtualize GPU resources, and even then miners use 100% of the GPU resources anyway, there's NO REASON TO USE VIRTUALIZATION TO MINE.

The point is to use the GPUs for mining and the other resources for visualization why have all those resources go to waste.

[DavinciJ15]

I manage a bunch of ESX and ESXi clusters. What the OP wants to do is... for lack of a better word, useless. If you have GPU cards in a server/workstation then you should just install LinuxCoin on that box and run your miners. Installing ESX/i doesn't give you any benefit, even if it were possible to get the drivers to work with the GPUs, because the whole point of ESX is to virtualize hardware. Since by definition you cannot virtualize GPU resources, and even then miners use 100% of the GPU resources anyway, there's NO REASON TO USE VIRTUALIZATION TO MINE.

Let's step through the BS in your post

1. "useless"? I have numerous VMs across multiple ESXi systems and need to keep them running, that is high power readily available hardware prime for GPUs. I need to keep ESXi running so why wouldn't I try and leverage the hardware on hand and do what the OP is looking to do.

2. You can virtualize GPU resources at varying levels between hypervisors however at this time not OpenCL. In this case pass that GPU directly to the VM itself using VT-d or IOMMU letting the VM execute whatever it wants on the GPU.

break break...

To address the OPs question, I have a couple of ESXi systems myself and was thinking the same thing since it's hardware. The primary issue is the stack of software you need to talk to the card, one can hack some packages into ESXi but you need X windows running with the fglrx driver. That requirement means you will need a large stack of packages to get it moving and would need to start hacking in a big way, start by researching whether or not it's even possible to get X running on ESXi itself.

Sadly my ESXi systems do not support VT-d/IOMMU or I would install my GPUs, map them to a VM and run my miners there.

One way or another I would like to run my miners on a box where I can have virtual servers doing something else other than mining.

Thanks for this post.

[DavinciJ15]

I say its theoretically possible, but would require extremely major modification of both ESXi and the fglrx drivers, so not something you could just make some instructions for. I am curious as to why you would want to do this. I am also missing the connection to reusing the server for headless Windows server.

I would think it would take a professional coder much more than 20 BTC worth of time to complete a project of this magnitude, even at the all time high BTC/USD exchange rate.

I do, however, like your thinking because sometimes it is unconventional ideas like this that spur innovationa and development.

BTW, are you the guy with the youtube videos about silver?

The reason is to run other applications on the box doing mining the make money leveraging all aspects of the hardware.
BTW Yes I am the guy who makes silver videos.   

[DavinciJ15]

Your problem is that you for some reason are stuck on using ESXi. You have a few options.

1. I read somewhere that Windows only uses 100% CPU under certain SDK/driver versions. So if you can find the driver version that doesn't use 100% CPU for mining, you can run windows as the host OS and mine there, and still instlal your guest VM's.
2. Linux doesn't have the problem of 100% CPU use during mining. SO you can use linux as your host OS, mine from there, and install VMWare or some other VM software, and run your guest VM's from that.

I have looked and tried every version of the drivers none of them use 0% CPU time unless you plug in a monitor to first card mine device 0 then plug in the monitor to second card and mine device 0.  That process works but there is no way to automate it.

As for running a guest that does the mining, from this thread you can see it does not work.

[DavinciJ15]

Well in his OP he said the reason he didn't want to run windows as a the host OS was because it uses a  lot of CPU. I got the impression that's why he wanted to run ESXi as the host OS. Am I wrong, or was it simply a thinly veiled attempt at making the post not look like a blatant attempt to run mining on someone else's server? His company's server, a server of a client of his company?

Negative, Negative, I wanted to use the resources of the CPU and ram for some other task since I have so many of them it would be nice to leverage their power in other ways.

[Tmoney]

Install Virtualbox on top of Linux.

[gfaust]

not sure about vmware, but I could come up with a guide for xenserver for 20 BTC.... would that work?

[blumpkinpie76]

I say its theoretically possible, but would require extremely major modification of both ESXi and the fglrx drivers, so not something you could just make some instructions for. I am curious as to why you would want to do this. I am also missing the connection to reusing the server for headless Windows server.

I would think it would take a professional coder much more than 20 BTC worth of time to complete a project of this magnitude, even at the all time high BTC/USD exchange rate.

I do, however, like your thinking because sometimes it is unconventional ideas like this that spur innovationa and development.

BTW, are you the guy with the youtube videos about silver?

Why would you have to mod the fglrx drivers ?

Im not an expert, but the fglrx drivers are for Linux and I would be really surprised if someone could get ESXi to install them. As someone mentioned earlier in this thread, ESXi is not Linux, might appear to be but it is a proprietary OS. Someone with more knowledge please correct me if I am wrong.

[blumpkinpie76]

I manage a bunch of ESX and ESXi clusters. What the OP wants to do is... for lack of a better word, useless. If you have GPU cards in a server/workstation then you should just install LinuxCoin on that box and run your miners. Installing ESX/i doesn't give you any benefit, even if it were possible to get the drivers to work with the GPUs, because the whole point of ESX is to virtualize hardware. Since by definition you cannot virtualize GPU resources, and even then miners use 100% of the GPU resources anyway, there's NO REASON TO USE VIRTUALIZATION TO MINE.

The point is to use the GPUs for mining and the other resources for visualization why have all those resources go to waste.

Now I understand what you are after, got it!

[blumpkinpie76]

I say its theoretically possible, but would require extremely major modification of both ESXi and the fglrx drivers, so not something you could just make some instructions for. I am curious as to why you would want to do this. I am also missing the connection to reusing the server for headless Windows server.

I would think it would take a professional coder much more than 20 BTC worth of time to complete a project of this magnitude, even at the all time high BTC/USD exchange rate.

I do, however, like your thinking because sometimes it is unconventional ideas like this that spur innovationa and development.

BTW, are you the guy with the youtube videos about silver?

The reason is to run other applications on the box doing mining the make money leveraging all aspects of the hardware.
BTW Yes I am the guy who makes silver videos.   

Thanks dude!

[DavinciJ15]

not sure about vmware, but I could come up with a guide for xenserver for 20 BTC.... would that work?

I may take you up on that offer if I have no other choice.

[shakaru]

http://www.petri.co.il/vmware-esxi4-vmdirectpath.htm

I take it you found this and gave it a shot, right?

[shotgun]

Install Virtualbox on top of Linux.

Exactly. The host OS has to be the one to interface with the GPUs - virtualizing the GPU resources doesn't give you "extra" mining resources via some magic. If the OP wants to use the CPU/Mem/IO resources while the GPU is mining then either one of two things can happen:

1. run the apps that need CPU/RAM/IO on the same damn server and be done with it - no virtualization necessary.
2. run ESX-Server or Virtualbox or Xen to create guest OSes on top of the main Linux OS running the mining app.

There's NO REASON TO USE ESX or ESXi. And still this remains one of the dumber questions I've seen about virtualization. Sorry, no offense but this really stinks of confusion about what virtualization is for and how computing resources are allocated to programs in Linux/Unix.

[Capitan]

OP, your response to my last post, "Negative, Negative...", wasn't actually negative. What you said basically is what I said in my post. You didn't refute any of it. Like I said before, and as several other posters have also said now, you don't need ESXi. You can just run Linux as the main OS and mine from there, and install VMWare Server inside the linux install, and launch guest VM's from within Linux. Or use any other VM server that runs inside of Linux. You can even do this within windows too.

There's no reason to try to do this using ESXi, and the fact that someone would be stuck on using ESXi is the reason I became suspicious that you were trying to mine on a company's servers. In that case I imagined your company had ESXi servers, and you wanted to mine on them, so you had to work backwards from ESXi. I doubt anyone would be dumb enough to do that. Well, no, scratch that. I am not accusing you of doing that. But there has actually already been one case in the media of someone being prosecuted for mining on his employer's servers.

There was also a university that sued someone a few years back for running distributed computer (one of the scientific ones, like Distributed.net or something). They sued him for retroactive back-pay too, for all the months of increased electricity and heating costs he caused them by running the distributed app on hundreds of their computers.

[DavinciJ15]

Install Virtualbox on top of Linux.

Exactly. The host OS has to be the one to interface with the GPUs - virtualizing the GPU resources doesn't give you "extra" mining resources via some magic. If the OP wants to use the CPU/Mem/IO resources while the GPU is mining then either one of two things can happen:

1. run the apps that need CPU/RAM/IO on the same damn server and be done with it - no virtualization necessary.
2. run ESX-Server or Virtualbox or Xen to create guest OSes on top of the main Linux OS running the mining app.

There's NO REASON TO USE ESX or ESXi. And still this remains one of the dumber questions I've seen about virtualization. Sorry, no offense but this really stinks of confusion about what virtualization is for and how computing resources are allocated to programs in Linux/Unix.

No offence taken I just notice that smart people don't like to read.  If you did you would know that I wanted to leverage my knowledge of ESXi and vSphere instead of investing time learning and trouble shooting something new it's worth money to me pay someone to find me the answer.

No offence but it takes street smarts to operate efficiently.

[DavinciJ15]

OP, your response to my last post, "Negative, Negative...", wasn't actually negative. What you said basically is what I said in my post. You didn't refute any of it. Like I said before, and as several other posters have also said now, you don't need ESXi. You can just run Linux as the main OS and mine from there, and install VMWare Server inside the linux install, and launch guest VM's from within Linux. Or use any other VM server that runs inside of Linux. You can even do this within windows too.

There's no reason to try to do this using ESXi, and the fact that someone would be stuck on using ESXi is the reason I became suspicious that you were trying to mine on a company's servers. In that case I imagined your company had ESXi servers, and you wanted to mine on them, so you had to work backwards from ESXi. I doubt anyone would be dumb enough to do that. Well, no, scratch that. I am not accusing you of doing that. But there has actually already been one case in the media of someone being prosecuted for mining on his employer's servers.

There was also a university that sued someone a few years back for running distributed computer (one of the scientific ones, like Distributed.net or something). They sued him for retroactive back-pay too, for all the months of increased electricity and heating costs he caused them by running the distributed app on hundreds of their computers.

I meant Negative as "No".

[DavinciJ15]

OP, your response to my last post, "Negative, Negative...", wasn't actually negative. What you said basically is what I said in my post. You didn't refute any of it. Like I said before, and as several other posters have also said now, you don't need ESXi. You can just run Linux as the main OS and mine from there, and install VMWare Server inside the linux install, and launch guest VM's from within Linux. Or use any other VM server that runs inside of Linux. You can even do this within windows too.

There's no reason to try to do this using ESXi, and the fact that someone would be stuck on using ESXi is the reason I became suspicious that you were trying to mine on a company's servers. In that case I imagined your company had ESXi servers, and you wanted to mine on them, so you had to work backwards from ESXi. I doubt anyone would be dumb enough to do that. Well, no, scratch that. I am not accusing you of doing that. But there has actually already been one case in the media of someone being prosecuted for mining on his employer's servers.

There was also a university that sued someone a few years back for running distributed computer (one of the scientific ones, like Distributed.net or something). They sued him for retroactive back-pay too, for all the months of increased electricity and heating costs he caused them by running the distributed app on hundreds of their computers.

Text never translates well.  Your post was not negative and you misunderstood me.  It doesn't matter.