Citrix XenServer 6.5 was released a few weeks ago and it offers significant performance improvements. We are currently running 6.2, the previous version, here's a comparison chart of some of the improvements.
Citrix XenServer is the environment in which the HH and THG virtual machines (VM) are running.
Over the next couple of days frog will upgrade our XenServer installation to 6.5, this is going to involve the following steps.
* Setting up a new backup system for creating and storing VM snapshots on a remote server.
(Currently our backup system operates on the database, website and game servers, rather than the whole VM.
* Researching the safest/easiest/least messy method of upgrading to 6.5. This will boil down to either;
a) wiping the server, installing 6.5 and then dropping the latest VM snapshot backups on to it.
b) upgrading the current 6.2 installation.
All of this is going to be new territory for frog.
I think it's best to do this upgrade before investigating the ping issue relating to the TF2 servers.
A couple of points regarding the TF2 ping issue.
* It started out of the blue and after several weeks of trouble-free operation. This means it's not a capacity issue. It's not that the hardware and OS configuration that we have isn't suitable for the job.
* Pings spikes only seemed to occur on the TF2 servers, whereas a ping log from the server to my home network for 12 hours stayed in the range of 13.6ms to 28.4ms during the period that people where experiencing ping spikes on the TF2 servers.
[hr]
Hopefully its not to much of a headache for frog and all goes well. As he mentioned it is all new for him this xen software.
However he is the man and I have faith it will all go well