Game Server Virtualization?

[Alex]

Whats the best way to go about doing this, so that I retain full performance instead of running it in the native OS.

Should I use VMWare Workstation, VirtualBox, VMWare Player?

Help is appreciated.

[kraze]

From what I heard I believe VMWare is good.

[Alex]

Just curious on the performance in game servers, most people who use virtualization don't use it for game servers.

[Edge100x]

We use Xen for our VDSes here, but it is a tweaked and tested version that we carefully configure, so it performs better than standard XenServer and XCP releases.

Based on customer feedback,

* VirtualBox reportedly works well. It has a major advantage in that it can be installed and run within an unmodified Linux/Windows installation, so it does not require any special setup from us here at NFO. I'd recommend trying this first -- a customer made a KB article for it here: http://www.nfoservers.com/forums/viewto ... =46&t=4741

* Of the Xen products, XCP 1.0-beta would be best to try: http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2010/11/2 ... m-xen-org/. XCP seems to have more developer attention than other full Xen editions right now, and 1.0 works with XenCenter. (Old XCP editions do not work with XenCenter, and XenServer was not very stable in our testing.)

* VMWare ESXi does not seem to offer quite the performance that Xen editions do, and it is further limited because it does not offer HPET emulation (necessary for 1000fps on Windows). Other VMWare solutions would not likely be better.

* KVM, which is built into modern Linux versions and used by several major Linux distros now (including Ubuntu) as the virtualizer of choice, didn't have good performance for game servers when I tried it last. But, that was a year or two ago, and it is worth another look, especially if you're already running Linux (as it is an easy addition).

[Alex]

John, if you don't mind, do you think you can share some of those tweaks with me for Xen? I think I will give it a try.

I tried ESXi before, but it didn't really offer the functionality I needed.

[rustydusty1717]

John, if you don't mind, do you think you can share some of those tweaks with me for Xen? I think I will give it a try.

Doubtful.

[Edge100x]

John, if you don't mind, do you think you can share some of those tweaks with me for Xen? I think I will give it a try.

I can't get very in-depth about them, but you'll want to use stub domains and GPLPV drivers, among other things. These are things that you'd need to worry about after you get over the learning curve of installing the latest Xen and tools and setting up your first domain, which is pretty monumental. I'd recommend that you consider a pre-packaged solution such as XCP instead, for your first experience with Xen.

[Alex]

John, if you don't mind, do you think you can share some of those tweaks with me for Xen? I think I will give it a try.

I can't get very in-depth about them, but you'll want to use stub domains and GPLPV drivers, among other things. These are things that you'd need to worry about after you get over the learning curve of installing the latest Xen and tools and setting up your first domain, which is pretty monumental. I'd recommend that you consider a pre-packaged solution such as XCP instead, for your first experience with Xen.

Alright, I will do some research tonight. Quick question though, what about game servers in Hyper-V? Have you guys tried that? A friend and I were having a discussion about that last night.

[TimeX]

Much of John's insight is directly related to game server performance under a hypervisor, since our VDS servers are tuned with game server performance as a priority concern. That is not to say that tuning for game server performance means less optimized for other uses. Game servers are just more demanding from a performance standpoint.

Edit: I assumed Hyper-V was an abbreviation for hypervisor, but I see now that it is a specific product.

[Edge100x]

I have not tested yet with Hyper-V, since it didn't fit our needs for VDSes.

[Alex]

Alright thanks for the help you guys. I will give Xen and Hyper-V a try seperately and see which works better for my needs.