There's more than one purpose for virtualization. One is density. Case in point - VMWare did an experiment with ESX and Citrix density. On a native 2003 server with Citrix Presentation Server, they were able to get around 250 simultaneous users on the box with 80-90% CPU and Memory utilization.
When they did the same test under VMWare on the same hardware using multiple virtual machines, they were able to get just over 1000 simultaneous connections at the 80-90% CPU/Mem utilization level. It's all about where the bottlenecks are, and I'm not saying you could repeat this in every scenario - but generally with a bare-metal hypervisor, you can leverage your hardware much further than you would normally. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Midnight Sent: Saturday, October 11, 2008 2:31 AM To: Half-Life dedicated Win32 server mailing list Subject: Re: [hlds] HLDS Consumption 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. > > > _______________________________________________ > To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please > visit: > http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds > > _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds
