What's new
By:
  • Visit Rebornbuddy
  • Visit Panda Profiles
  • Visit LLamamMagic
  • Visit Resources
  • Visit Downloads
  • Visit Portal

Anyone has experience with running 5 VM's with wow and HB?

L

liquidsnake1989

Member
Joined
Apr 13, 2012
Messages
119
Reaction score
2
As the title sais, I'm looking for peepz who are running 5 (windows) clients virtually, via VMWare for example, with WoW and honorbuddy, and are willing to share their experience and setups. The reason I'm asking is because I've been struggling with it for a week now, but I CONSTANTLY get freezing/crashing VM's, sometimes my whole (host) PC freezes, it's all just as unstable as hell.

So I'm really wondering if other people are able to run 5 VM clients (or more even), what setup they use, what particular settings they have, et cetera.

I'll start with mine:
CPU: Intel Core i7-3820 @ 3.6 Ghz
Mobo: Intel DX79TO
RAM: 16GB G-Skill Ripjaws Z, currently running @1600Mhz, but will get it to 2133 soon
Harddrive1: 240GB Intel 520 SSD
Harddrive2: 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black
Harddrive3: 2TB Westen Digital Caviar Black
PSU: Cooler Master Silent Pro 700W
Host OS: Windows 7 x64

Virtual OS'es and settings:
OS: Windows 7 x64
1 processor, 2 cores
2GB RAM
80GB Harddisk

Of course I have my host Windows on the SSD, I have 2 VM's on the 1TB disk, and 3 VM's on the 2TB disk.

----------

I'm really desperate as to why it won't run. I'm going to run a Memtest86+ this night to check if there are maybe RAM issues, but I already ran it one 'pass' earlier and it didnt find any errors.

Any thoughts?
 
I am lucky to have 2-3 per machine. Typically if I'm running VM I'll do 2 VM and one WoW running on the host.

I would do more but I run out of physical resources. My VMs don't crash HB, I do get an occasional freeze every few hours.
 
Go back to basics - see if you can get one new VM rolling fine.

Do you get bsod when suspending the VM's...that would suggest memory errors. VM storage. Ram. Or physical storage.

I do fixed VM storage, not expandable on demand.

VM's been defragged / cleaned up by workstation lately?

I've tried 1 processor to run multiples and 1 proc two core. I think 2 core is the way to go.

4gb per VM - I set memory as fully allocated (do not swap) (but I have 32 GB to work with)

Virtualized by Intel...but this is usually set to automatic.

Look at your host performance while running and see if it gives you any hints.

2GB might not be enough.

I tried a full 5 man dungeon all by VM - I couldn't get it to work well. Had to split the load between two machines.
 
I'm curious as to why you are running VMs and not just run 5 x WoW locally on the PC?
 
For me fps its because I have some accounts with completely different names on the battle.net accounts. Old friends who gave up the game, and purchased accounts.

I got one banned when I was a rookie. Used the same credit card as my main to pay for game time and mailed a ton of mats / gold back and forth. I didn't know blizz would care.

Since then I've been paranoid. VM allows me to keep everything completely separated. Separate nic, drive id, etc. Almost impossible to accidentally use the same ip / hardware to login and play the way I have it set. Also easily minimized.

Haven't been able to find anyone that say they bot same hardware and ips on a single machine with different battle.net names (without getting banned).

Believe me I'd love to be free of VM - it's a hassle.
 
Thanks for all your replies. After making this topic, I went on searching and found some interesting stuff. What I've done now on all VM's, is disabled memory trimming. Normally, VM's who have identical code in their memories, share it between them, this decreases RAM load on the host machine, but it causes more I/O actions. I've disabled it now on all VM's, plus, on the VM that was freezing more often then the others (all the time, actually), I went in the .vmx config and added this line: "sched.mem.pshare.enable=FALSE", according to some best practice guide on the VMWare forums. Although I think I kinda understand what it does, I really can't explain it :P, if you want to know what it does you should google it, first three hits are bullseye.

Anyway, after doing these things, I was able to run 4 VM's yesterday; I played the tank on the host machine manually, and on the 4 VMs I had the healer and 3 DPS, and used dungeonbuddy. Although the bot chars all ran straight inside the mobs in the instance, it worked. I think thats a dungeonbuddy issue....
 
Unfortunately, again I got some WoW crashes and eventually one of the VM's freezed, which caused my VMWare Workstation to freeze as well. I've tried one more thing (here: https://gist.github.com/wpivotto/3993502), and will give it another go.

@botorific: You tried 5 VMs with 32GB of RAM and it didnt work? What are the rest of your specs?
 
Update: I've done three things now:
1. Changed/added the settings according to the link 3 posts back
2. Changed the Host Windows settings so Windows manages the pagefile again (pagefile.sys) (I used to turn this off since it saves like 10GB of space on ur HDD)
3. Played on a VM myself, instead of on the host machine.

After doing that, I was able to play for about ~2 hours, with no crashes or something like that. Will keep you posted.
 
liquidsnake1989 said:
RAM: 16GB G-Skill Ripjaws Z, currently running @1600Mhz, but will get it to 2133 soon
Click to expand...

Hey man theres really no point getting 2133 RAM, Intel bottlenecks at 1600 unless your running a i7 Extreme which you are not in this case, just thought id tell you so you can save some money :)
It will run 2133 RAM but will just downclock to 1600.
 
botorific said:
For me fps its because I have some accounts with completely different names on the battle.net accounts. Old friends who gave up the game, and purchased accounts.

I got one banned when I was a rookie. Used the same credit card as my main to pay for game time and mailed a ton of mats / gold back and forth. I didn't know blizz would care.

Since then I've been paranoid. VM allows me to keep everything completely separated. Separate nic, drive id, etc. Almost impossible to accidentally use the same ip / hardware to login and play the way I have it set. Also easily minimized.

Haven't been able to find anyone that say they bot same hardware and ips on a single machine with different battle.net names (without getting banned).

Believe me I'd love to be free of VM - it's a hassle.
Click to expand...

I have been running 3 accounts all with different names and addresses for the last 2-4 years. A couple of my friends stopped playing the game and I took over their accounts, mostly they are used for development purposes and occasionally they are used for farming. But all of them use the same credit card details. In fact, I have 10+ accounts all using the same credit card details.

I have considerably experience in account bannings and I have to say Blizzard seem to be very fair when it comes to NOT banning accounts that have done nothing wrong. Personally I would forgo that VMs.
 
Liquid - I have to look up those tweaks you posted. You are onto something.

I cloned a fifth VM to test with you. I learned that I could run 3-4 on one machine successfully but 5 always eluded me.

I run it how you do. Tanking on the host or separate machine pulling some duty because....

For some reason, you add the 5th and they will not all stay up. One or two crash within 5 minutes of starting the instance. Usually it's the tank with a critical memory error.

CPU hits 100% Physical RAM at 80%

What you are saying about multiples sharing the same RAM space makes a lot of sense. They are "memory can't be read errors"

I put the tank on a separate machine and run WoW straight from the host for the healer (3 dps in VM). I ran heroics this way for nearly 4 hours straight with zero problems.

Thanks for those leads, I'll let you know if I get anywhere.
 
Oh liquid, usually toons running by mobs in dungeon buddy is a CR related problem with movement. You'll have a really hard time getting the group to function properly if it isn't singular controlling it. Superbad for druid is pretty good tho. IWantMovement plugin has potential.
 
Thanks for all the replies. @Sakatard: Yeah, I learned the hard way :P Only figured that out once I bought it. Im going to keep it though, it was in sale so the price difference between this and 1600Mhz ram was only a couple of euros.
@botorific: Thanks for the info. I'm going to do a lot more instances this week probably, so plenty of time to test it some more. It kinda looks promising though.... As for the movement problem, its kinda situational beceause it happened in deadmines, but not in stockade, wailing caverns or gnomeregan. Will keep an eye out and if it starts to annoy really bad I'll check CR's and that plugin you mentioned.
 
Nevermind .... Tried again today, but upon starting WoW and HB, one of the VM's crashed. Then I tried again, another one crashed.

Now i'm going to try and run 2 WoWs on the host machine, and 3 virtual.
 
What software are you using for VM? I had a shit ton of issues with VMBox and VMware workstation 8 works perfectly.
 
I think I'm moving away from my VMs, but FWIW I had better results creating fresh installed win7 VMs rather that basing it off a physical machine. Still, it it's resource heavy.

I've learned Alot, but lost a lot of time leveling toons as a result.

I'm using linked VMs to keep file size down. Not sure if this is the cause of crashes when we scale to 5.

There are too many variables. 4 virtual processors with 2 cores each causing the problem? Shared memory space issues? Shared physical space issues? I've tried manipulating all these things.

(Ssd storage, spreading vms over multiple drives)

As newer releases of HB came out it was obvious performance, especially with VM's changed. You could get performance back by upping process priority or running 2 core on the VM's.

Even if we figure all of this out with workstation....it could be HB or the gfx rendering. I don't do anything else with these VM's that scale this much to know one way or another.

I run workstation 9.
 
as botanic said, Im starting to doubt if its maybe HB itself, or the dungeonbuddy bot... because starting WOW on all clients works 9 out of 10 times. Starting hb gets me in to trouble some times, but starting dungeonbuddy, or running dungeonbuddy causes the most crashes.

I dont know what to try anymore, I tried 1 wow on host and 4 in VM, 2 on host and 3 in VM.... ill try 5 on host as well, see what that does. But im really getting the impression its just hb.

Im going to run LinX (stress tool) on ALL vm's these days, and if it doesnt crash or freeze, it CANNOT be a memory/CPU issue. then it is just a case of hb/profile/bot having poor handling with the resources.
 
Good point - our experiences show within minutes of starting DB. Often my task is errored out on the first pull and the group wipes.

Wow launch is fine
Hb attach is fine as well as start...but instance fails
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top