boinc on xen domain[0]

[fveulemans]

i have a server running xen and installed boinc on the main host, domain[0]. immediately i saw the average cpu usage going up (all the way ). will this influence the performance of my virtual machines? or do i better install boinc in these virtual machines rather than the main one?

floris.

[Giorgio]

I have no experience with Xen but in general Boinc uses the 'free' resources and should other processes (thus also virtual machines) give priority. I do not know if practically this is really going as smooth and I personally think that there will be an impact on your running virtual machines.

If I would have such a config I would probably install 1 virtual machine with Boinc and not install Boinc on the host. But as said this is only based on my feeling and not on experience. Maybe some one here on the forum has already an experience with crunching in such an environment and can give better advise.

Giorgio

[PowerToTheUsers]

There are two kinds of virtualization: one type is the OS-app-OS: like an operating system in VirtualPC or VMWare Workstation on a parent OS. The other type is the hypervisor-based virtualisation like Hyper-V, ESX(i) and Xen. There both operating systems stand next to each other and can access the cpu directly. So in this case nor the "parent" nor the "child" know about the priority of the boinc-process on the other partitions.
I don't have or had boinc running in such virtualised environments yet, and I'm interested in the best practices too. I think if you run boinc on one virtual machine (or the parent), the other virtual servers will never get enough cpu-cycles if they require them.