Intel 7400 manual Problem statement, ESL Proof of Concept PoC overview

White Paper Consolidation of a Performance-Sensitive Application

Problem statement

ESL’s perception, along with that of many of its peers in the gaming industry, was that gaming servers “can’t be virtualized” due to their mission-critical nature, high CPU utilization, and the critical focus of their user base on the in-game transaction

4 sockets with 6 cores
Intel Xeon	Intel Xeon
4x	7400 Series
1066
	Intel Xeon
Intel Xeon

latency. However, ESL was very motivated to try to break through this “perception barrier” because it has been experiencing expo- nential growth for the past eight years, which caused substantial problems for its IT team in managing game server sprawl, costs, power, and operational expenses. The fundamental question was: could we deliver the benefits of virtualization for the gaming server infrastructure while maintaining high quality

Intel Xeon processor 7300 series

ESB2

I/O Bridge

32 Slots

•256 GB maximum

• 32 GB as tested

of service (QoS) levels as perceived by the ESL members? The virtualized game servers must deliver smooth game play and measurably competitive in-game transaction latencies to be acceptable to ESL’s customers.

Configurable PCI Express*

Figure 2.. Intel® Xeon® processor 7300 platform high-level architecture..

New Technologies Allow Us to Virtualize More

Our perceptions are shaped by our experiences and our knowl- edge of the experiences of others. These perceptions often become embedded in our thinking and need to be periodically challenged to be sure that they still represent reality. As tech- nology marches on, we have seen many IT perceptions change. With this in mind, and with consideration of the latest technology innovations that may be relevant to the problem at hand, ESL and Intel proceeded to examine our perceptions about the virtualiza- tion of gaming servers.

ESL Proof of Concept (PoC) overview

We know that servers grow more powerful with each new generation, which improves the performance of any application running on them, including virtualized ones. However, we also know that virtualization overheads are especially severe for I/O performance-sensitive applications such as this one, where in-game transaction latency (which includes the round-trip network latency) is so critical.

Our hypothesis was that virtualization of gaming servers may be possible if we use the latest technologies:

•Intel Xeon processor 7400-based servers with 24 processing cores to address the need for higher performance overall. This should allow us to deliver QoS headroom to counteract the over- heads of virtualization. This platform was also chosen due to the desire for high consolidation ratios to address ESL challenges with server sprawl, cost, power, and operational expenses.

•Intel NICs with the VMDq feature. which allow the virtualized network overheads to be minimized and the network load to be spread across multiple platform cores for higher performance and more headroom to maintain QoS.

•VMware ESX 3.5* to support the platform chosen. ESX 3.5 also delivers substantial networking performance improvements compared to earlier versions.

•VMware NetQueue feature, which provides the software environ- ment to take advantage of the VMDq feature in the latest NICs.

We could not find any industry data on the latency impact of virtualization that was relevant to typical gaming server proto- cols, so we decided to first test the network-latency impact

4