An Inside Look At Warhammer Online's Server Setup

An article at Gamasutra provides some details on the hardware Mythic uses to power Warhammer Online, courtesy of Chief Technical Officer Matt Shaw and Online Technical Director Andrew Mann. Quoting: "At any given time, approximately 2,000 servers are in operation, supporting the gameplay in WAR. Matt Shaw commented, 'What we call a server to the user, that main server is actually a cluster of a number of machines. Our Server Farm in Virginia, for example,' Mann said, 'has about 60 Dell Blade chassis running Warhammer Online — each hosting up to 16 servers. All in all, we have about 700 servers in operation at this location.' ... 'We use blade architecture heavily for Warhammer Online,' Mann noted. 'Almost every server that we deploy is a blade system. We don't use virtualization; our software is somewhat virtualized itself. We've always had the technology to run our game world across several pieces of hardware. It's application-layer clustering at a process level. Virtualization wouldn't gain us much because we already run very close to peak CPU usage on these systems.' ... The normalized server configuration — in use across all of the Mythic-managed facilities — features dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors running at 3 GHz with 8 GB of RAM."

Re:WTF is Warhammer Online?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. They have a mac client. Nerd rage much?

Re:Article summary

[iamapizza]

Be thankful it isn't another iphone advert.

Re:Dell ad?

[Opportunist]

You enjoy squaring circles?

You want an MMO that is approachable and very easy to play, where learning a pattern of repeated keystrokes ensures success that runs along the creed of "insert time, get reward", where items and their stats are the be-all, end-all defining element when it comes to the strength of your character without too much dependency on your playing skill (i.e. a WoW-like game) with a complex player driven economy, where almost all equipment is entirely player created, with a complex resource/research/production chain, where groups of players hold territory that determines who has access to which resources (i.e. EvE's economy)?

I think such a game is impossible. Or, at least, it would not be fun to play for the majority of its population...