White Paper: Holdfast Virtualization Solution On Intel Architecture

Holdfast Online Technology Co. Ltd., one of the largest game operators based in China, provides a platform to host third-party operator LAN-based console games, enabling gamers to play against each other in wide area networks. Infrastructure maintenance and operation investment management are the primary mandates of the online game operators. Traditionally, game operators have utilized a dedicated server model; Holdfast has revolutionized the game hosting services marketplace through the innovative use of virtualization.

These challenges drive online game operators to seek solutions to improve system high availability, critical for improving the end user experiwww wence and increasing service levels.

The goal of the Holdfast solution went beyond consolidation and having the ability to provide business continuity under conditions of server outages or unexpected spikes in customer demand. While the virtualization solution provided very comparable performance to native performance, the high availability (HA) virtualization solution deployed on Intel® Xeon® processors helped Holdfast reach their primary goals of both functionality and performance. It was also observed that Intel® Virtualization Technology could improve system stability without the need to replace the application software, thus reducing the investment cost.