question

Brent Batas (Lisk) avatar image
Brent Batas (Lisk) asked

Do "maximum servers" and "standby servers" refer to the # of machines or # of exes?

I'm looking at configuring servers 2.0 for my title.

https://i.imgur.com/tz95ZTv.png

I'm getting pretty confused with some of the documentation/terminology, because 'server' seems like it could mean a physical machine or an exe that runs my game.

Suppose I'm running 4 exes per machine.


If I have standby servers of 1, does that mean it will try to maintain at least 1 standby exe? Or does it mean it will try to have 1 machine fully on standby (no exes running) at all times?

Same question for maximum servers: is this a cap on the number of exes or machines?

Custom Game Servers
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Sarah Zhang avatar image
Sarah Zhang answered
    • This “server” means a container running your game server executable. There may be multiple servers running on a single virtual machine. So it’s not a physical machine.
    • If we have standby servers of 1, it means it will maintain at least 1 standby sever(container).
    • “maximum servers” means the maximum number of game servers to operate in the specified region.
    • For more info of build's definition, please check this doc.
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    Seth Du avatar image
    Seth Du answered

    When you create a build, you are able to choose different Virtual machine size:

    You can say the basic unit is the core. My testing title has 4 Dv2 cores in EastUs and 4 Dv2 cores in WestUs. All the detailed server information can be found on: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/playfab/features/multiplayer/servers/multiplayer-servers-detailed-price-sheet. I think what you have mentioned about executable should be the server instance, basically the topological structure of it is: Azure endpoint -> multiple VMs -> multiple server instances.

    When you create a build on Game Manager, you can choose Virtual machine size, for example, I choose D1_v2 ( 1 core per machine), then input 2 servers per machine, which means for now each server instance will occupy 0.5 core. The configuration cannot be changed after this build is created. The “0.5 core/server” will be applied to all the regions you added in this build. Now, since my title has 4 Dv2 cores in WestUs, I can add 8 servers in Maximum because 4 ÷0.5 = 8.(the screenshot shows 4 takes 50% capacity).

    Take another case as an example, if I chose D1_v2 ( 1 core per machine) and 1 server per machine when creating the build in the same title, each server will occupy 1 core. If I input 4 in Maximum servers, the pop-up will show it has taken 100% capacity.

    The Virtual machine size and Servers per machine depends on your scale of game and how many computing resources that a build requires. You can modify it if necessary. Please directly consult sales team to expand the capacity.

    In terms of Standby server, the quantity of it should be larger than 1 but less than the Maximum, it simply shows how many servers will be in stand-by states. The advantages of it is that players are able to quickly access to the multiplayer server otherwise they will wait for the server to boot up and get ready. This simply increases the game experiences. However, there will be surcharge, please refer to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/playfab/features/multiplayer/servers/billing-for-thunderhead. We do not recommend to set 0 because players will not able to access any multiplayer server APIs since all servers are down and you have to set at least 1 stand-by server via API calls as a boot up process.


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    Brent Batas (Lisk) avatar image Brent Batas (Lisk) commented ·

    Thanks for the detailed answer, Seth!

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