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

[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.