Physical vs. virtual mining

Question

Which would be better, many physical servers mining or one virtual machine running on openstack and adding hardware as you go?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Monero mining uses the AES-NI instructions from the Intel processor, as well as memory, and raw processor speed. Therefore, adding VMs will just add unnecessary overhead. The best way to mine is to run on the physical machine, with a number of threads that's optimal (determined by both the number of AES-NI capable cores and the amount of cache, as each mining thread needs 2 MB of fast memory).

Now, if your virtualization system can add additional hardware, then it might be worth it for convenience alone, as the overhead might not be too significant if the VM layer can offer access to the underlying AES-NI hardware.