General Questions:

[Ashioni]

Howdy:

Please be advised, I know nothing of this product and I have some general questions.

To start, I've been web hosting using cPanel for going on 10 years (Love it), so I do have some kind of idea how WHM/cPanel work.

I'm now thinking about getting in to game server and voice chat hosting using cPanel / CPGS, but I'm having a hard time finding / understanding anything about the setup.

Q1: I assume this is a module that is added to WHM that would allow for setting up and controlling secondary servers? (I'm assuming it doesn't setup a game server on the same box CPGS is running on, but do not know)

Q2: On the server side of things, what is required for both CPGS and the game servers. (RAM, HD ETC)

Q3: Can one physical server run multiple client game servers? Client 1 - L4D Client 2 - L4D2 on the same physical box, or does each game / client require its own physical hardware? (Assuming I have large servers)

Thank you for your time.

-Me

[darren]

Greetings
cPGS is a addon/plugin you can install with one click in the "Manage Plugins" page in WHM, after it's installed, refresh the browser and you'll see the link to it at the bottom of the menu on the left. From the cPGS page you can install cPGSD (the "remote" daemon backend that does most of the work) on remote servers if you wish (no cPanel needed, just Linux with basic stuff like gcc and perl / CPAN configured.) You can run game servers on either the local machine with cPanel/WHM on it or the remote machines, or any combination you wish. You can run any type of game server under each account on any of the servers with cPGSD installed, no restrictions there. As far as hardware goes, it totally depends on what and how many server(s) you want to run and how many clients will be playing on them. Older servers like Counter Strike can run on pretty minimal hardware while others may require a little bit more juice. Keep in mind that cPGS is still in a BETA stage where major changes can occur with little to no warning and support is only available through me during weekdays. I try to keep things as stable as possible while getting things to a nice feature plateau for the 1.0 release, just don't expect it to handle all the issues clients may ask for, some manual intervention and such of the games is required at times. Let me know if you have anymore questions or concerns.

[Ashioni]

Hi Darren:

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.

That helps a lot, I guess my biggest question is do I just run one massive linux box or do I setup an ESX box and run a lot of linux images on that.

The server in question is a Dual Xeon X5560 (2.8Ghz)[Turbo] with 144 GiG of ram (yes 144 gig), Dual Gigabit nics.

I'm thinking it would be best to just run ESX and the game servers as virtuals. I'm not sure how these games servers will run as virtuals tho. If anyone out there has tried this please let me know how it worked out for you.

As always thanks for your time.

Greetings
cPGS is a addon/plugin you can install with one click in the "Manage Plugins" page in WHM, after it's installed, refresh the browser and you'll see the link to it at the bottom of the menu on the left. From the cPGS page you can install cPGSD (the "remote" daemon backend that does most of the work) on remote servers if you wish (no cPanel needed, just Linux with basic stuff like gcc and perl / CPAN configured.) You can run game servers on either the local machine with cPanel/WHM on it or the remote machines, or any combination you wish. You can run any type of game server under each account on any of the servers with cPGSD installed, no restrictions there. As far as hardware goes, it totally depends on what and how many server(s) you want to run and how many clients will be playing on them. Older servers like Counter Strike can run on pretty minimal hardware while others may require a little bit more juice. Keep in mind that cPGS is still in a BETA stage where major changes can occur with little to no warning and support is only available through me during weekdays. I try to keep things as stable as possible while getting things to a nice feature plateau for the 1.0 release, just don't expect it to handle all the issues clients may ask for, some manual intervention and such of the games is required at times. Let me know if you have anymore questions or concerns.

[darren]

I haven't heard or seen anything good about running game servers under any sort of VPS, Xen, ESX, Virtuozzo, you name it. The extra overhead isn't so much the problem, but usually with the quirky ways in which the VPS handle resource limiting and allocation. Some games with such-and-such mod may malloc 2GB ram for a brief second (that it will never actually use) on startup, but the VPS kills it when it's launched with an ENOMEM error, for one example. You can try it out and see how it works for you, but I've wasted a lot of time and energy debugging problems on VPSs that ultimately I have no control over. Are you wanting to divide up the servers for security separation or as a way to limit resources used by any one server ?

[Ashioni]

Nothing like that, I'm just trying to figure out how to address the issue of deploying 10, 50, 100 game servers to that many customers. I would like to avoid deploying that many physical boxes. Cost sky rocket when we start adding racks, power, air etc...

I know in the past when we played around with the idea of hosting chat servers (Vent/TS) we could run a large number of service instances on one physical box. All that needed to be done was changing of the ports. So 10 customers could each have their own "server" all on the same physical but one would have port 4000, another port 4050 and so on.

Do these games work the same way? Does each instance of the game get its own port on the physical box? (sorry for my confusion, I do not play a lot of games, which is why I'm trying to do the research before I invest the time)

As always, thanks for your time.

I haven't heard or seen anything good about running game servers under any sort of VPS, Xen, ESX, Virtuozzo, you name it. The extra overhead isn't so much the problem, but usually with the quirky ways in which the VPS handle resource limiting and allocation. Some games with such-and-such mod may malloc 2GB ram for a brief second (that it will never actually use) on startup, but the VPS kills it when it's launched with an ENOMEM error, for one example. You can try it out and see how it works for you, but I've wasted a lot of time and energy debugging problems on VPSs that ultimately I have no control over. Are you wanting to divide up the servers for security separation or as a way to limit resources used by any one server ?

[darren]

Indeed, each game can be assigned one or more IPs and ports so that you can run as many instances of a game server on a single machine as the machine can handle. In your case you will run out of CPU long before running out of RAM due the the huge amount installed in the box. Each game is different and there are no real finite numbers available available as far as I know as for exactly how much one server uses in comparison with another.
One thing I might offer if you are just considering the GSP market is to check webhostingtalk.com and any other heavy traffic forum to see how other hosts manage things, I know the profit margin in hosting is pretty slim with all the $1/yr accounts the fly-by-night companies offer, the same is true with GSPs if not more so it seems, so watch the math when crunching the numbers