There are probably lots of folks who have seen or read about Chia farming. Chia is a newer Crypto currency being touted as a green and sustainable bitcoin that is focused on the use of excess available space. You use your computer to plot a series of cyptographic hexes in your available storage. Plotting is temporary storage intensive and can take a toll on consumer grade SSDs. But beyond the plotting efforts you can then use the plots to farm Chia which essentially allows your storage to act as a validation for the Chia blockchain.

So I’ve been working on my Homelab for sometime using it for home automation, self-taught network administration, and Linux. I have a r720 and an r230 running in a Proxmox cluster. I got a sweet deal on some Netapp 4243 24x disk shelves a little while ago. So in the end I want to setup a virtualized harvester on a FreeNAS with the 4243 shelf and some LSI host cards. For now let’s discuss a Proxmox virtualized Chia farm.

When Chia mainnet came about I had originally started with a virtual machine for both plotting and harvesting, but quickly found that no matter how I provisioned the virtual machine I just couldn’t get consistently high I/O to the plotting SSD, an Intel P4510 with a StarTech PCI adapter card.

I had tried using a PCI Passthru with the SSD and while it seemed to work at first I ran into issues with degrading I/O that seemed to be tied to the queuing of I/O in the hyperadvisor.

So with that I set out to create a LXC Container for my plotter and would use SFTP to move the plots over to the VM harvester. Next article will have the specific configuration walk-thru for the LXC container.