The MOSES project ( http://militarymetaverse.org/ ) has experimented with a number of different Open Simulator deployment methods. The grid is currently has access to a blend of 5 Dell PowerEdge R815 servers and one Dell PowerEdge R220. The R815's are virtual machine servers and the R220 is a small Linux host used to serve up to 10 sims. On the R815's we can stand up any operating system we wish to experiment with using virtual machines.
Currently, our favorite installation method is using Ubuntu Linux. This is only for convenience as all of the dependencies are available as packages. On Ubuntu, we can start with a bare OS install through completely functioning MOSES grid in about 3 hours, including compiling from source. Less time when dealing with binaries. Our Complete Instructions Here: http://militarymetaverse.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/MIAB_Installation_Instructions_using_Virtual_Box_and_Ubuntu-141006.pdf We have worked with CentOS, but it is a lot of work. Mostly because of the bootstrapping needed to get Mono and its associated packages working. It is easy to make mistakes and you can spend hours troubleshooting. In the end, it seems to operate similarly as Ubuntu. The version of Windows we typically work with is the Army Golden Master of Windows 2008 Server or Windows 7 AGM. The biggest issue we deal with is just setting up the environment and being forced to manually download and install all the dependencies. This can take days. The Army version of Windows also has extra registry values and network policies that pose configuration challenges. Virtual Machine Performance Differences? In our testing we have not *yet* found any measurable difference in performance between Open Simulator deployed via VM or bare host on any operating system. This has been independently verified by our industry partners and other military labs using their own internal hosts as well as Amazon EC2. Operating System Performance Differences? Unfortunately there are so many variables that affect open simulator performance that anecdotal evidence to support Windows or Linux simply don't hold up. Its not a simple matter of comparing .Net to Mono. The operating systems are fundamentally different, so a proper test would involve replicating the Open Simulator servers as closely as possible on each. This would require an initial benchmark test that has both Windows and Linux servers using the same version of Mono, same version of Apache, same version of MySQL, etc... on the same host configuration (i.e. hardware or VM profile). Any deviations introduce variables to the test that must be accounted for. For example, only after the Windows vs. Linux test has been completed and analyzed for differences can you then introduce another variable of .Net vs. Mono and re-run the performance benchmarks. The original Windows vs. Linux benchmark is the baseline. Douglas Maxwell, MSME Science and Technology Manager Virtual World Strategic Applications U.S. Army Research Lab Simulation & Training Technology Center (STTC) (c) (407) 242-0209<tel:%28407%29%20242-0209>
_______________________________________________ Opensim-dev mailing list [email protected] http://opensimulator.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev
