Is XEN still the best virtualization for game servers?

[IcEWoLF]

Its been few years since NFo has been offering VDS machines for game servers, now we are in 2014, do you guys still think Xen is still the best available option for game server hosting?

[Edge100x]

Yes, Xen still seems to be the best. Some can be thrown out for obvious reasons (Hyper-V doesn't allow enough cores; OpenVZ and other simple containers don't isolate enough, don't provide enough customization potential, and can't run multiple OSes) and others simply aren't better (VMware, which is also prohibitively expensive; and KVM). The closest competitor to Xen would be KVM.

It is convenient that Xen is still on top, because we have a large installed base of Xen machines, including lots of Windows hosts. Using a different virtualization software would require reconfiguration of those customers if we wished to move them to the new platform, effectively segmenting our network and raising costs.

[IcEWoLF]

It feels like these days running 3 servers on a 4 core vds is not enough. I will need to upgrade to the next tier which is 6 cores. I am averaging 68% CPU usage with 3 32 slot servers.
1 CSS, 1 CS:GO, 1 NEOTOKYO...this is brutal.
In a perfect world a server without plugins would do fine, but lets face it, nobody wants to play on a default server these days...

[kraze]

It feels like these days running 3 servers on a 4 core vds is not enough. I will need to upgrade to the next tier which is 6 cores. I am averaging 68% CPU usage with 3 32 slot servers.
1 CSS, 1 CS:GO, 1 NEOTOKYO...this is brutal.
In a perfect world a server without plugins would do fine, but lets face it, nobody wants to play on a default server these days...

I would agree it's rare that you find a fully stock server. With those numbers that means each server is almost using a full core. Unfortunately, it's a battle that will not end soon, only when game developers start taking advantage of multiple cores will issues like this go away. Our only response is to heavily tweak our installs, and run the fast machines, which is what we already do.

Our recommendation is generally two servers per HT core, but users which are running larger servers or heavily modded ones should aim for one server per HT core.

[IcEWoLF]

It feels like these days running 3 servers on a 4 core vds is not enough. I will need to upgrade to the next tier which is 6 cores. I am averaging 68% CPU usage with 3 32 slot servers.
1 CSS, 1 CS:GO, 1 NEOTOKYO...this is brutal.
In a perfect world a server without plugins would do fine, but lets face it, nobody wants to play on a default server these days...

I would agree it's rare that you find a fully stock server. With those numbers that means each server is almost using a full core. Unfortunately, it's a battle that will not end soon, only when game developers start taking advantage of multiple cores will issues like this go away. Our only response is to heavily tweak our installs, and run the fast machines, which is what we already do.

Our recommendation is generally two servers per HT core, but users which are running larger servers or heavily modded ones should aim for one server per HT core.

Devs have been screwing the consumer in every single way. It's 2014 and they should consider optimizing these games. The only reason they might be doing this is to promote hardware and cause people to buy the latest and greatest every few months to keep up with some of these games, same thing can be said for GSP's.
Also the file size for some of these games these days are out of THIS world!
I run 2 SSD drives and a standard HDD drive and they are filling up very quickly!

I find myself annoyed more than anything.
Anyways, I am glad NFo offers affordable prices for VDS servers, otherwise I don't think we could afford to add anymore servers!

I went ahead and upgraded to the 6 core plan and hopefully this will help reducing overall cpu usage. I am sure it won't be a huge change, but all I want it to be is stay under 50% with all server slots filled.

[soja]

The goal/reason for keeping below 50% is to avoid spikes. If you have all 3 servers full and are seeing 68% usage, that would be acceptable for me. There is no server that would spike that usage any higher. We pushed one of our windows dedis to 72% yesterday with the TF2 update, and I joined half a dozen servers and still saw perfect performance on all of them.