How are MMORPGs hosted?

Bestinna

JUST OUT OF CURIOSITY: What type of computer is used to host an MMO? I'm not interested in knowing how difficult it is to create an mmo, how much money it costs, what anyone's chances of succeeding are, I just want to know the name of the big server computer thing and where people get them (just out of curiosity).

filmoret

Here is a website.  They mainly use the xenon processors.

https://www.liquidweb.com/dedicated/?gclid=CJftvuG02dACFQwYgQodZTIB9Q

filmoret

Most of it has to do with the amount of traffic and bandwidth you are expecting.  You could host WOW on just about any modern computer.  But you wouldn't be able to host more then a few dozen players.

Kyleran

Then there is EVE.

https://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/tranquility-tech-3/

Bestinna

DMKano said:

I can tell you that the vast majority of MMOs from the big publishers all ran on HP C7000s - Blizzard, SoE, NCSoft, etc... all ran their games on HP blades.

However since Cisco UCS came out many companies have started switching to UCS as the hardware to host their games.

As far as Network gear goes - Cisco is the preferred vendor (Blizzard is all cisco in data centers) from switches to edge routers. There are exceptions - Bioware/EA uses Juniper for SWTOR, but L2 is Cisco.

Load balancers - all F5s - i think all game companies run em

Bottom line blade servers is the prefferred server platform.

Awesome, thanks. Complete answer for anyone who wants to know!

filmoret

Yea those really expensive top end processors.  Those are for servers.  Intel Xenon's and AMD Opteron's.  The blades also allow for 2 processors when needed.

Quizzical

filmoret said:

Here is a website.  They mainly use the xenon processors.

https://www.liquidweb.com/dedicated/?gclid=CJftvuG02dACFQwYgQodZTIB9Q

Intel server CPUs are, in fact, solid, and not a noble gas.  I think you mean "Xeon", not "xenon", as you said twice.

filmoret

Quizzical said:

filmoret said:

Here is a website.  They mainly use the xenon processors.

https://www.liquidweb.com/dedicated/?gclid=CJftvuG02dACFQwYgQodZTIB9Q

Intel server CPUs are, in fact, solid, and not a noble gas.  I think you mean "Xeon", not "xenon", as you said twice.

Well when I presented the design to Intel I named it Xenon.  They later changed it because of copyright issues.  So it will always be xenon to me.

ConstantineMerus

They pray to god then a cute server appears in a basket floating down the river. 

Sorry couldn't resist to troll