CPU Bitcoin Mining with VMWare and Winminer - I made a free $20 in a week

Last week I started playing around with cryptocurrency mining. I’m an independent IT guy and do quite a bit of web and virtual machine hosting. All of my servers are dedicated,stand-alone hardware and housed in data centers. My monthly costs are fixed and include the hardware, bandwidth and electricity. On each server I run a free version of VMware. The servers I use are moderately robust with 16 core processors and are rarely under more than 25% CPU load.

CPU Load with Miner Running:

As an experiment, on one of my servers, I created a virtual machine running a free copy Windows 2012 Server Evaluation edition. I reduced the CPU allocation of my other VM’s on the server and loaded up my mining VM with 75% of my server’s full CPU core capacity. I then loaded Winminer on the VM and started the miner. From my research, Winminer reviews are mixed, but there’s no denying its ease of set up and use. Once cranked up, my VM was producing between $0.90 and $1.10 per day and my full server CPU load never exceeded 75% capacity. None of my web servers or other VMs suffered any performance degradation at all. I repeated the process on two more of my dedicated servers and was generating an average of $3.00 per day.

CPU Load of Miner Compared to Other VMs on Server

Check back with me - I’ll keep playing around and keep you posted. If you have any constructive advice or input – please comment!