Playfab instance costs & resource allocation?
I am potentially interested in Playfab for developing a multiplayer game, where the authoritative simulation is running on the server where a state is maintained, updates sent to the players and data from this state saved into a persistent database, so that game state could be saved and reloaded.
I researched the documentation but I couldn't find answers to several important questions with respect to the resources I would be getting on the VM Instances. Under 'Multiplayer Servers', it only says I would be getting '1500 Fv2 Hours'.
1) What is an Fv2? Is it similar to say, an AWS C5 instance?
2) Clockspeed?
3) Memory?
4) How many game sessions can I run on one instance?
5) What happens if I need more instances? The pricing here is very unclear, for example, all 3 options, Free/Standard/Premium all get the same 1500 hours allocation, but there seems to be no clear pricing plan in place if I need more.
Best Answer
Here is the detailed sheet for Fv2 Series according to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/playfab/features/multiplayer/servers/multiplayer-servers-detailed-price-sheet
| Fv2 Series | Cores | RAM | Storage | Windows | Linux |
| F2 v2 | 2 | 4.00 GiB | 16 GiB | $0.163 | $0.085 |
| F4 v2 | 4 | 8.00 GiB | 32 GiB | $0.326 | $0.169 |
| F8 v2 | 8 | 16.00 GiB | 64 GiB | $0.651 | $0.338 |
| F16 v2 | 16 | 32.00 GiB | 128 GiB | $1.302 | $0.677 |
Since it is based on Azure, you may also refer to the Azure documentation for more about Fv2 Series VM:
- fsv2-series
- compute-benchmark-scores (this may be the thing you are looking for)
When you create your server build, you can select different VM in the configuration. However, by default Av2 Series and Fv2 Series will be available when you enable Multiplayer 2.0 and for scaling cores, you need to submit a support ticket or using the contact information on the configuration page to inform us.
Please also note that it is possible that not all types of VM series are available in some regions. You may need to contact us for details when you want to increase the quota.
>>How many game sessions can I run on one instance?
It depends on your build settings, which is Servers per Machine. If you are using Matchmaking auto allocation with Multiplayer server 2.0, each game session will host a game server instance. You may also manually request the server instance for players and theoretically, you can host any game sessions in one server instance as long as the computing capability is enough. However, Multiplayer server 2.0 is designed for session based games like PUBG, DOTA, and we don't suggest hosting long-time-running MMO on it.
