Finally, ESXi Part III

Last time I gave a breakdown of the server that I am using ESXi on:
1 physical CPU being split into 2 virtual CPUs
3.5 Gigs of memory
An 80 Gig hard drive. 

I put two (2) bots on this machine and some time has passed.  How does it perform and more importantly, what resources are required to run each individual virtual machine?

Fortunately for us, ESXi has a plethora of tools available which can give you more information than is required.

As you can see from the above graph, this bot is consuming about half of the CPU resources.  This is not surprising as there is one physical core being split into two (2) virtual processors.  It also indicates that we need approximately 1.6 Ghz for a virtual machine.  My best guess was that 1.5 Ghz would be sufficient to run a bot.

The above graph shows disk usage.  As you would expect, there is not a lot disk read/writes during idle time and even during a trade event, there is not a sufficient drain on resources.  I should throw in a caveat here.  The hard drive in this machine is an older 5400 RPM drive with an 80 Gig capacity.  It is enough for a two (2) bot setup.  If one is desiring to run an eight (8) bot chain, there is going to be more disk activity as you would expect.  There is going to come to a point where simultaneous trade events will start to over-lap and start to degrade the smoothness of the trade, possibly damaging potential sales.

One could mitigate this by using an SSD drive ot a Hybrid drive and putting MTGO files in a folder and then networking that folder thereby minimizing disk access drive.  This procedure has been detailed in previous entries.  Next time, we’ll continue our exploration of ESXi.