Intel 7400 ESL game testing, GB memory, Windows 2003 server 32 bit and Counter-Strike, Firewall

White Paper Consolidation of a Performance-Sensitive Application

VM1			VMn		Svc		Cons
	vSwitch 1					vSwitch 0
10 GbE VMDq						1 GbE
		Force 10		S50N
		ESL Network

Firewall

Internet

Figure 13.. Live Internet test setup..

Counter-	Counter-
Strike 1.6*	Strike 1.6*
Windows	Windows
Server 2003*	Server 2003*
32 bit	32 bit
VM1	VMn
	VMware ESX 3.5 U1*

Intel® Xeon® Processor 7400 Series-based Server

Figure 14.. Test software stack..

ESL game testing

At ESL labs, we ran a series of tests cases that included private and public Internet testing. All these tests revealed that there is no impact on in-game latency, and as a result there is no impact on the gaming experience.

As part of this testing, we used an Intel Xeon processor 7400 server code-named “Dunnington.” This is an MP server with four sockets and six cores per socket, with a total of 24 cores. This server is connected to a 10 GbE port of a 1G/10G aggregation switch by using a 10 GbE CX4 NIC. ESX 3.5 U1 was installed on the server, and each virtual machine is configured with 1vCPU,

2 GB memory, Windows 2003 server (32 bit) and Counter-Strike

1.6(three game servers running per VM). We are not using any kind of CPU affinity or memory reservations. Also, on the ESX server we enabled the “NetQueue” feature and by default a maximum of 16 queues per 10 GbE port are created.

As a part of load generation we used real players who connected to the game servers on the local LAN and through the Internet, and “bots,” which are an emulation of a player playing a game. These bots run on the game server as a plug-in and generate CPU load. The setup and configuration are shown in Figures 13 and 14.

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