Intel 7400 - Manual (Page 3)

ESL
Electronic Sports League (ESL) is the largest online gaming
community in Europe, with more than 844,000 active
users as of August 12, 2008.
ESL has deployed thousands of game servers to provide
services to its members. Obviously, for a game services
company, the game servers are mission critical. The key
performance criterion measured by gamers is the in-game
transaction latency, which determines the responsiveness
of the game and is a key component in the competitive
edge for the players, many of whom are actually profes-
sionals and quite demanding of the performance of this
key criterion. In addition, most game server code is single-
threaded and very CPU intensive, with CPU utilization
typically in the 60-80 percent range.
Introduction — Can We
Virtualize Everything?
Virtualization of enterprise data center applications using hyper-
visors or VMMs is taking a predictable path. It started with the
consolidation of the simplest, least performance-sensitive, and
least mission-critical applications, many of which had hardware
utilization figures in the 10 percent or less range. These applica-
tions were the “low-hanging fruit” of the first wave of applica-
tion virtualization, and consolidation ratios were quite high while
still delivering adequate performance. This consolidation wave
delivered a significantly positive ROI to the organizations. IT
organizations would like to have the benefits of virtualization
across the entire spectrum of applications, but there are
challenges to delivering on this potential.
“Non-virtualizable” applications
Not all enterprise applications fit the description above, of course.
There are more complex, high-performance, and mission-critical
applications, too. Many of these applications are very demand-
ing of the hardware resources in state-of-the-art servers; there-
fore we expect that it would be more difficult to virtualize them
while retaining adequate performance. Examples of some of
the generic types of applications that don’t fit the “low-hang-
ing fruit” description are those characterized by the following
characteristics:
• Mission critical
• Transaction latency sensitive
• CPU intensive: single thread vs. multi-thread
• Memory intensive: size/throughput/latency
• I/O intensive: disk/network; throughput/latency
From our experiences with virtualization we know there are
certain overheads involved with delivering the value that a
VMM/hypervisor provides. These overheads can impact all the
characteristics noted above. This leads to the perception that
these types of applications “can’t be virtualized” because the
tradeoffs would be too severe. Is this a perception or reality?
Internet
Firewall
Game Servers
Figure 1 . ESL game server high-level architecture .
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White Paper Consolidation of a Performance-Sensitive Application