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Thread: VM / Linux questions

  1. #1
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    VM / Linux questions

    Does Vbox use the same IP address as the host and if not how do I find the IP address of my virtual box linux machine?

    Actually the total question is can BoincTasks see and manage VMs from Windows and if so how do you set it up?
    Last edited by Bryan; 10-10-14 at 12:37 AM.


  2. #2
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    Re: VM / Linux questions

    Depends on how you configure the network on the guest. Simplest is to use a "Bridged Adapter" on your guest. That way it will grab its' own address via DHCP and look to anything else on your network (including the host system it's running on) as something "out there" on your network. If you use "NAT" for your guest network, all the traffic to/from the guest goes through the hosts networking layer, so appears to have the same IP Address. That makes it a bit more challenging to use BOINC Tasks, etc, because then you need to get weird with your "port" that BOINC communicates on. (By default, all BOINC communications use port 31416, but when NAT'ing, you have to use an alternate port for each guest on a given host so you can tell which BOINC traffic should go to which guest rather than the host.)

    On most Linux flavors, you can use the "ifconfig -a" command on the terminal (commandline) to have the system show you the IP address it was assigned. Most linux flavors have an applet somewhere on the desktop that controls networking, so you can see the assigned IP address using a GUI tool to. It's just not quite as cut-and-dried to be able to say "go here and do this." Or you can look on your router that's handing addresses out locally to see Connected machines.

  3. #3
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    Re: VM / Linux questions

    I think you answered my question Mumps. I found the IP address and it says it is NAT and the IP address it shows can't be pinged from another machine on the network. We will be heading to TX Sat. morning so I don't have time to dick with getting the networking stuff working as its own IP. I'll just have to tie in with TV and make changes to the projects I'm running on Linux.

    Then again, I looked at the Network setting on the Vbox VM and there is a field to select NAT versus several others including "bridged". Do you know if I can just change that on the fly?


  4. #4
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    Re: VM / Linux questions

    I've actually never tried to change it with the guest runnig. Worst that could happen is you would need to reboot the guest. If it lets you change it with the guest running, it would make sense that it could simply notify the guest to grab an address and happily move on. As long as you have access to the virtualbox management tool, I'd say try it. Unless you're running projects with super long running tasks, that is.

  5. #5
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    Re: VM / Linux questions

    BINGO!!!

    It will change on the fly BoincTasks works now ... thank you Mumps!!!!!!

    Out of curiosity, in comparison to running native Linux, how close does a VM perform?


  6. #6
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    Re: VM / Linux questions

    I haven't really ever assembled any data to check that out. Mainly because when I've been running Linux Guests on my Linux Hosts, I've also over-subscribed the CPU's. So the Guests in my case will run slower than dedicated hardware. For the most part though, given things like guests with no over subscribing, I'd offer a wild stab that they should be within 5% of native performance these days. I'll see if I can hunt down any Guests that are running any projects with reasonably consistent WU times where things aren't over subscribed to try and get some numbers.

  7. #7

    Re: VM / Linux questions

    Performance depends on the workload in the guests, and as mumps mentioned the load on the host system. If you are using the VMs to run your asic work, then you should get native performance as long as you are not maxing out your host system. I used to run my farm on all linux vms for doing the cpu work, and just matched up 1:1 vcpu to physical you should get 95-98% of native on a good bare metal hypervisor.

  8. #8
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    Re: VM / Linux questions

    "bare metal hypervisor" Now there is a term I haven't seen in years. I used to think it was some form of specialized physical hardware. But that was when I was even less knowledgeable then I am now and "Virtual" was only used in SiFi movies.


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  9. #9
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    Re: VM / Linux questions

    Quote Originally Posted by Mr. Hankey View Post
    Performance depends on the workload in the guests, and as mumps mentioned the load on the host system. If you are using the VMs to run your asic work, then you should get native performance as long as you are not maxing out your host system. I used to run my farm on all linux vms for doing the cpu work, and just matched up 1:1 vcpu to physical you should get 95-98% of native on a good bare metal hypervisor.
    I'm matching it up with the real hw; 12 threads in the CPU so I'm running 10 CPU tasks/threads in the VM and 2 threads in Windows for BU. Since BU takes virtually nothing then the machines are only loaded to about 80%.

    The only problem I foresee is now whenever I begin a new project I'll have to run benchmarks to see whether the Windows or Linux apps are quicker and which pays better I guess I can live with that


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