You need to run several game servers on a VM for a real test.  If you 
are just running just running one you can only really tell if the FPS is 
unstable and that's probably about it.  Anyone who would rent a VM to 
run servers wants to run more than one, otherwise they would just rent 1 
server from a GSP cause it is cheaper.

On a broader sense, there is no reason to try and run games in a VM that 
I can think of.  If the idea is to slice and dice a big server and offer 
it up in smaller affordable pieces, that's exactly what GSP's already 
do, and you can buy a server from them piecemeal and just pay for what 
you need.  The idea that there are huge margins built into the pricing 
of game servers and you can save money with a VM is a farce.  If that 
were true then a new GSP would spring up, with lower prices than 
everyone else and take all the business.  The free market already keeps 
prices at very competitive levels.

The purpose of VM's is to run multiple different OS's on the same 
hardware and/or to be able to configure several copies of an OS each 
with their own software and configurations and run them all together to 
maintain high hardware usage efficiency.  In the case of game servers 
there is no need to double up OS's on a box to increase CPU efficiency 
because you can just install multiple game servers under one OS and 
achieve the same thing with less overhead.

If a GSP wanted to rent a VM server to someone to run game servers on, 
they will price it based on how much CPU & RAM the games in the VM are 
expected to use (unless they want to give away free CPU), exactly the 
same way they would price it as if those games were not running inside 
the VM.  Only now the pricing is harder to estimate because it's hard to 
tell how the user will setup and run the games, the load is less 
quantifiable because you give the user more leeway to load things up as 
much as they possibly can.  Therefore the price should be higher to 
accommodate the worst case.  If they don't price the VM high, it won't 
be long before a few users abuse it and the GSP will see that they are 
loosing money and either cut it or raise the price.

You would be much better off just asking for a discount for ordering 
multiple servers, or if you need a lot of servers you can just get your 
own box.  There really is no need for a middle ground between a single 
server and a dedicated box - multiple server discounts already fill that 
void.



Ook wrote:
> OoksServer.no-ip.info:27019 - hl1mp:source running on Win2000 guest on Sun 
> VirtualBox 2.0.2. Host is Phenom 9600 quad core idling at 3% cpu. Guest is 
> Win2000 with 1GB ram idling at 1%. Guest is running in headless mode.
>
> OoksServer.no-ip.info:27016 - hl1mp:source running normally on Sempron 2400, 
> 768MB ram.
>
> I'll run them for a day or so. If anyone wants to try them, feel free do to 
> so, and comment here on any differences. I don't have the bandwidth to 
> really load them up and do some real stress tests, so there may not be an 
> noticeable differences. If this was a commercial setup, I've have a lot more 
> memory in the box, and I'd run several VMs at once, and dedicate a cpu core 
> to each. 
>
>
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