bit-tech's Multi-Core Gaming Server

Nice system. Too bad I have a wedding at 5. I mean who has a wedding at five in the evening on wendsday?!?!

I shall be there, and, the system looks lurvly :D - I can't imagine the power in that thing, but I can assume it's rather enjoyable to use.

Show off!

Originally Posted by Enak
Show off!

Not half!

damn. I dont think I'll be able to download CS:S quick enough as I've not re-dwnloaded it since format

::EDIT:: Only 900MB or so to download, which is good. The bad however is that I'm only on a 1MB connection. Oh yeah.. that and I suck at CS:S anyway :P

Is the prize.. the server? (wishful thinking)

"Right now, we can't tell you exactly what our gaming server is running - not until the Intel Developer Forum at the end of September"

So does that mean it's not a cloverton ES?

doh, might have to start playing cs again!

The server looks great - hoping to visit it tonight when I get in from work.

One minor point:

Originally Posted by article
maybe WinXP, just for a laugh! - and get Quake 4 up and running on that.

I had XP as a games server and found the max connections limit of XP limited it to 10 players.

FREAK out!!! I cant wait till my 10meg line is up and running to get back into CS again. w00000

why don't i have counterstrike ahh well good luck for the others

Why am I on a laptop??

Damn you Bit-Tech!

Nice hardware spec, but why on earth did you install windows 64bit as the base operating system?? Runing VMware is absolutely a good thing to do, but is severely hampered by not using it as the base operating system itself. Did you do this because of the VMware ESX licencing cost? coz you are loosing out on a big chunk of performance by not truely virtualising.

VMware ESX should be the base OS with windows 2003 64bit running as a virtual alongside linux etc.

Seems like a big waste of 8GB ram and 8 or so cores.

The other oversight seems to be the lack of SAS drives. Disk I/O is incredibly important when virtualising, particularly when you have multiple VM's residing on the same physical disk. SATA is inadequate for a server of this nature.

Lastly, where is the 4th SATA drive...I see only 3 external bays, is the other on an external SATA connector or internally mounted?

Explanation please...as it's an interesting project.

....sorry to be picky, but you want to build a cheetah right, not an elephant.

Christ almighty!

I shall be there!

Woah. I remember there being some hints of something to do with a bit-tech server, but this is just awesome. Hopefully it'll be advertised on the front page more, as the old one wasn't really well publicised and so was nearly always empty.
Nice one guys ;)

Originally Posted by ozstrike
Woah. I remember there being some hints of something to do with a bit-tech server, but this is just awesome. Hopefully it'll be advertised on the front page more, as the old one wasn't really well publicised and so was nearly always empty.
Nice one guys ;)

Force refresh the front page ;)

Originally Posted by Rascal
Nice hardware spec, but why on earth did you install windows 64bit as the base operating system?? Runing VMware is absolutely a good thing to do, but is severely hampered by not using it as the base operating system itself. Did you do this because of the VMware ESX licencing cost? coz you are loosing out on a big chunk of performance by not truely virtualising.

VMware ESX should be the base OS with windows 2003 64bit running as a virtual alongside linux etc.

Seems like a big waste of 8GB ram and 8 or so cores.

The other oversight seems to be the lack of SAS drives. Disk I/O is incredibly important when virtualising, particularly when you have multiple VM's residing on the same physical disk. SATA is inadequate for a server of this nature.

Lastly, where is the 4th SATA drive...I see only 3 external bays, is the other on an external SATA connector or internally mounted?

Explanation please...as it's an interesting project.

....sorry to be picky, but you want to build a cheetah right, not an elephant.

Three words - work in progress :D Definitely taking your comments on board, we have lots of work to do on the server before we're done with it!

Originally Posted by Rascal
Nice hardware spec, but why on earth did you install windows 64bit as the base operating system?? Runing VMware is absolutely a good thing to do, but is severely hampered by not using it as the base operating system itself. Did you do this because of the VMware ESX licencing cost? coz you are loosing out on a big chunk of performance by not truely virtualising.

VMware ESX should be the base OS with windows 2003 64bit running as a virtual alongside linux etc.

Seems like a big waste of 8GB ram and 8 or so cores.

The other oversight seems to be the lack of SAS drives. Disk I/O is incredibly important when virtualising, particularly when you have multiple VM's residing on the same physical disk. SATA is inadequate for a server of this nature.

Lastly, where is the 4th SATA drive...I see only 3 external bays, is the other on an external SATA connector or internally mounted?

Explanation please...as it's an interesting project.

....sorry to be picky, but you want to build a cheetah right, not an elephant.

Hi There, cheers for replying (especially as you've registered especially to do so).

I'm sure it was mentioned in the review that this is being done in joint with Trusted Reviews, which is where I'm from if you don't recognise my name straight away.

I compeltely agree with your sentiments. I didn't want to install Windows as the base OS. However, some of this hardware is still in alpha, and we had a few issues with the RAID setup. As this wasn't finalised and would probably involve a re-install at some point, we figured this would do for the moment. We'll be following up on the article once we get these issues figured out and virtualization going ahead fully.

I'm not by any stretch of the imagination a virtualization geek (yet), and I was under the impression VMWare it had to be installed on to an OS in the first place (I was going to put Fedora x64 on there). Looking up ESX, it would seem a considerably better way of going. Now it's just a matter of finding the funds for the license ;)

As far as SAS, for running gaming servers - I wasn't convinced the IO was going to be particuarly important as it'll be mainly running from memory? No?

I thought I remembered Tim hinting at something :D

Edit: ah I see the advert on the front page now. Is that going to be a semi-permanent thing, or are you going to find other ways to publicise it?

I'm not sure at the moment, the header image will stay there for a while now and if/when we change it for something else, we might put it in rotation on the 468 ad slots... however, that decision is down to the sales guys. I'm sure that Geoff would be for it though. :)

I'm gonna wait for the BF2 server

I'm wondering why virtualise at all? Obviously you can run several different OSes at once which is great but why do you need more than one OS? Can't you run all the game servers you want on a single OS?

I am so up for a game tonight!

Originally Posted by Spode
Looking up ESX, it would seem a considerably better way of going. Now it's just a matter of finding the funds for the license ;)

I think someone needs to sweet talk VMware into donating one. ;)

Originally Posted by DeX
Can't you run all the game servers you want on a single OS?

That's the reason right there :)