Intel 7400 manual ROI Delivered, Server consolidation, Navid Javadi, aka mousesportsKapio

White Paper Consolidation of a Performance-Sensitive Application

Average CPU Utilization (percentage)

100

80

60

40

20

740
720	(Watts)
700
	Power
680

660

640

24 32 36 40 Number of VMs

Figure 15.. ESL virtual game servers on Intel® Xeon® processor 7400 Series-based platforms..

ROI Delivered

Server consolidation

Figure 15 represents the CPU utilization and power utilized by the server at various numbers of virtual machines under a full load. The bar graph represents CPU utilization, and the line graph represents power utilized by the server. The horizontal axis represents the number of virtual machines, and the left vertical axis and right vertical axis represent the scale for CPU utilization and power utilization, respectively.

Since the server has 24 cores, we started with 24 virtual machines, all of them configured identically as mentioned earlier. As we can see from the graph, for identical 24 virtual machines the total average CPU utilization was a little more than 40 percent, and power utilized was about 665 watts.

As the server is not fully utilized, the number of virtual machines was scaled up to 40. At 40 virtual machines the CPU utilization was about 90 percent, and power utilized was about 725 watts. Even at 90 percent utilization there was no impact on the in-game

latency or gaming experience. But in ESL’s current native envi- ronment, ESL tries to limit the CPU utilization per server around 60–80 percent. ESL needs this head room as there can be situa- tions where some game servers need more resources. Therefore, it was decided that 36 virtual machines is the optimal number as the CPU utilization and power utilization are 75 percent and 710 watts, respectively.

Below is the quote from “Kapio,” a professional gamer who actually played Counter-Strike on the virtual machines. He did not see any difference as compared to native.

“Playing on virtualized game servers running on Intel and VMware technologies gives professional gamers no disadvantages compared with playing on a non-virtualized server.. Everything ran smoothly, and I did not notice anything unusual.. A perfect setup for professional gaming..”

— Navid Javadi, aka mousesportsKapio

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