The impact of virtualization on the performance of Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Today's highly successful Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have millions of registered users and hundreds of thousands of active concurrent users. As a result of the highly dynamic MMOG usage patterns, the MMOG operators pre-provision and then maintain throughout the lifetime of the game tens of thousands of compute resources in data centers located across the world. Until recently, the difficulty of porting the MMOG software services to different platforms made it impractical to dynamically provision resources external to the MMOG operators' data centers. However, virtualization is a new technology that promises to alleviate this problem by providing a uniform computing platform with minimal overhead. To investigate the potential of this new technology, in this paper we propose a new hybrid resource provisioning model that uses a smaller and less expensive set of self-owned data centers, complemented by virtualized cloud computing resources during peak hours. Using real traces from RuneScape, one of the most successful contemporary MMOGs, we evaluate with simulations the effectiveness of the on-demand cloud resource provisioning strategy for MMOGs. We assess the impact of provisioning of virtualized cloud resources, analyze the components of virtualization overhead, and compare provisioning of virtualized resources with direct provisioning of data center resources.