Virtual Machine Farm and Wow

[entoptic]

So lets just say for poo and giggles that you have an ESX server containing 5 Virtual Machines.

Would it be possible to run WoW on the ESX server with say 10 Virtual Machines? I don't see why not and I don't see if there would be any issues with it at all.

Does anyone have experience with these servers? We are using them here at work however the guys don't know to much about them since the servers are new.

[Ken]

I don't think it will work, because I don't think it can virtualze the graphics card with decent performance (if such a server would contain a decent graphics card, which I doubt).

[Sarduci]

As far as I'm aware, ESX does not support 3D graphics. I believe that's a requirement for WoW.

Otherwise, if you can run 10 OS's and 10 copies of the game at the same time, you should be fine. The overhead would be killer to run that many VM's.

[entoptic]

I know that my VMfusion on a mac that runs ESX has 3d graphic support and I just googled ESX and 3d graphics which turned up results that indeed point to YES it does support it.

I dont believe the overhead would be large to run 10 vm.

We have a Virtual Center right now that is being setup and will run 3 ESX servers with 100 VMs on it.

What this getting me thinking about is a multiboxing VC in which you would pay company X for Y amounts of VMs to box Z game. Bandwidth would be an issue but man that would be epic.

[Sarduci]

I use it for load balancers and web farms so if you say so.....

I'll agree with you if you are using a 16 proc, 64GB of RAM system with fiber DAS system for disk, then running 10 copies of WoW is nothing.

Now, if you want to do the same thing with a 4 proc, 8gb of RAM system running SATA II drives, you may have a problem.....

[emesis]

These posts all miss the main limitation of running WoW in a virtualized environment (outside the fact that I can't really think of a good reason to do so for multiboxers following ToS) - video bandwidth. Feeding any kind of video through a TCP/IP connection, whether you use remote desktop or the built-in virtual center = OMG slow. x10 = OMFG.

[Fleecy]

I know there is a 3-D add-on that will allow 3-D graphics within a VM but I don't recall if it is released by VMware or a third party. I was successfully able to run WoW in a virtual machine once the 3-D acceleration add-on/expansion was installed.

[twigboy2000]

Looking at VMware's product guide, the only two products that support 3D are VMFusion and VMWare Workstation 6.5 (DX 9.0).

The ESX hypervisor doesn't offer any support for 3D and as mentioned previously, your method of connecting to those VM's is either through the console on the VI client, through Windows remote desktop or through NX / VNC on linux (none of which support 3D pass through AFAIK).

If I had the spare time, I'd fire up an XP VM on my test cluster just to nail it down.

-twig

[Catamer]

most servers don't support 3D and if you find one that does it will probably require that the 3D processing was done on a video card.
So 10 copies of wow would have to be processed through the single video card.

I was trying to use a graphics package to create images for a web page but had to abandon the design. the software package I wanted to use required DirectX 9.0+ which requires a relatively new video card and the particular older model of Dell server only had PCI-X slots ( not PCI-E slots ). I found that nobody makes a PCI-X video card. I also had to consider that all of the images for all users would be drawn with the video card GPU. ( The program or web page had worked wonderfully on my development workstation but died when I tried to deploy on a server )

[vishnu16]

Looking at VMware's product guide, the only two products that support 3D are VMFusion and VMWare Workstation 6.5 (DX 9.0).

The ESX hypervisor doesn't offer any support for 3D and as mentioned previously, your method of connecting to those VM's is either through the console on the VI client, through Windows remote desktop or through NX / VNC on linux (none of which support 3D pass through AFAIK).

If I had the spare time, I'd fire up an XP VM on my test cluster just to nail it down.

-twig

Thank you sharing this info.