New EU servers

Hi all,

Our new EU servers are being installed this weekend. Thanks to the great support of our players we were able to buy brand new Xeon E3 servers!

Im at location right now to set them up. Later we'll have some global downtime to make the switch from the leaseweb machines, I'll update when that happens. Probably within the next week.

Sent from my Desire HD using Tapatalk

 

Awesome news!

Cant wait xD

 

Well, there's gonna be some delay, I forgot to buy RAID controllers with the servers so there's no way I can install them right now. The mobo supports raid but it's kind a more like Fakeraid which just isn't suitable enough. I can't move the site now because if one harddrive crashes we're screwed so, I need to buy raid controllers, drive all the way back to the hoster and install them.

This kind a sucks, I'll probably have to delay this until the end of my vacation, so beginning of november.

 

Ouch.. Well, a month delay is not too bad (Considering what great thing awaits us!) 3,50Ghz! Man, i bet we can expand our mods even more xD and make the servers even better!

As it says above, at least we are not rushing things

 

3.9 ghz with turbo mode I believe which is obv. activated

 

omg.. can't wait to see it in action xD

 

Well, I decided to buy just one RAID controller, with very good reasons since it costs 425 euro's (!) It has 512 MB cache though, dual core 1.2 ghz cpu and a battery backup unit so it should perform pretty sweet

So for the gameserver, since that data is not critical I'll use a software raid. Got a nice pic btw from the network statistics while installing L4D2 from the Steam servers, look below under 'recv' which is the rate of the data coming in, I got to 53 mB/s at one point, that's megabytes not bits




Btw I'm amazed how fast software raid actually is. This is a test on a RAID 5 volume while rebuilding is still in progress and eating away 40 mb/s.

/dev/md3:
Timing buffered disk reads: 512 MB in 3.05 seconds = 168.01 MB/sec

md3 : active raid5 sdd3[4] sdc3[2] sda3[0] sdb3[1]
1414626816 blocks level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [UUU_]
[==>..................] recovery = 11.6% (55118976/471542272) finish=171.1min speed=40541K/sec

This is RAID5 over 4x WD SATA 7200 RPM Caviar Black disks with 64 mB cache.

The CPU's are blazing fast as well, It compiled a kernel in under 2 minutes I'm also following this guide in order to boost the FPS for L4D2: http://wiki.fragaholics.de/index.php/EN:Linux_Kernel_Optimization

 

Close to the current one, dronten NL.

Sent from my Desire HD using Tapatalk

 

Well I considered using RAID 10 first, however L4D(2) servers hardly do any I/O on the disk, except when installing or updating servers, but when they run the disk load is almost zero. The problem with RAID 10 is that on a disk failure you have to reboot the system and boot from the other RAID0 set (correct me if I'm wrong here but I believe that's the case )

Now with RAID 5 one drive can fail and the server keeps running and I don't need to be in a hurry to get home and reboot the server, or replace the hard drive. The boot partition is RAID 1 though because Grub doesn't support RAID 5 but if that RAID 1 fails it doesn't really matter once the system is booted.

So I don't need RAID 10 performance and RAID 5 buys me a lot more time in case of a drive failure, those were my motivations

I bought a RAID controller for the DB server though, this one:

http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/support/raid/sas_raid/sas-5805/

That's gonna be a RAID5 as well I just can't take any system crashes due to a HDD failure, especially our MySQL database are very sensitive when the server suddenly shuts down while there is a lot of activity. Besides all gameservers would crashloop when that happens until it's fixed.

 

You should have a pretty decent ping then

 

Damn if I just knew that last saturday when I had to wait 2 hours in the burning sun for the guy to show up