Microsoft Windows Server 2012Customer Solution Case Study

Leader of the Korean Game Industry and Service Quality IndexBuilding a Company-wide Integrated Test Server with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

OverviewCountry or Region: KoreaIndustry: EntertainmentCustomer ProfileNEXON is a global enterprise servicing more than 60 game titles in over 100 countries worldwide in the second quarter of 2012. It has around 77.4 million active monthly users.

Business SituationThe company's aim was to make sure that service quality is guaranteed before games are officially released by building an integrated test server infrastructure for all of the company’s services.

SolutionAs it was contemplating a large-scale integrated testing infrastructure, they had the opportunity to review the Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V technology early on.

Benefits Empirical Verification of the Cloud OS

Concept Having the Know-how to Build an

Integrated Test Server More Stringent Pre-release Quality

Assurance Technical Support Becomes Transparent

“We were undecided between Hyper-V and vSphere for achieving the effect of giving separate physical test servers to various development teams and, at the same time, handle the test demand on the same infrastructure from the IT department’s point of view. But through the Windows Server 2012 RDP, we settled on Hyper-V.”

Cho Ju-hyeong, a team leader at NEXON

NEXON started running some of its web services and development servers in virtual environments in 2007. In early 2012, it migrated over 300 servers for web development, advertising, portals, and billing to a virtual environment. With this background, NEXON embarked on a project to build a company-wide integrated test server in early 2012. While reviewing the technologies available, NEXON participated in the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP). Upon completing this program, NEXON decided to use Windows Server 2012 for the company-wide integrated test server, which was one of the core projects for 2012. After this company-wide integrated test server has been implemented, NEXON plans to consider adopting System Center 2012 as well. NEXON expects to improve customer satisfaction in the long term through implementation of the company-wide integrated test server infrastructure. This is because this infrastructure allows NEXON to conduct pre-evaluation of bugs, performance degradation, and many other issues using the same conditions as the actual operating servers before releasing new services.

SituationAdventure and pioneering are the core values NEXON has adhered to since it was founded in 1994 through to its position as leader of the global entertainment business today. In fact, many of NEXON’s undertakings have been world firsts. This is true not just for the gaming service. As the leader of the online gaming industry, NEXON has always been at the forefront of technical innovation. As shown through the examples of DOOMVAS which was designed to guarantee service reliability for the growing user base, the hybrid P2P engine which enables enjoyment of arcade games, and Quve which is designed for publishing large-scale games, NEXON has never let up in striving for technical innovation in order to provide the best gaming experience to its users.

Another example of such core technical innovation for customers is the Private Cloud. In early 2012, NEXON decided to build a company-wide test server environment. It wanted to build a company-wide, general-purpose infrastructure which could be used in quality assurance (QA) to identify bugs and performance bottlenecks after developing a service and before its official launch. Previously, NEXON’s environment consisted of development, staging, and production. The IT department's new mission was to include integrated testing between development and staging. But this mission did not prove easy. It was not as simple as running a few test servers in the virtual environment.

NEXON’s IT department has been building virtual server infrastructure for web development, advertising, portals, and billing since the mid 2000s, and has been running over 300 virtual machines as of 2012. With their long history of using virtualization technologies, NEXON’s IT department is well-aware of the technical limitations. Cho Ju-hyeong, a team leader at NEXON, said, “High availability, scalability, and security are prerequisites for using virtualization for core

business. However, the existing virtualization technologies were not suitable for running core business since it requires shared storage devices for achieving high availability, and scalability and performance could not be guaranteed due to the limitations on CPU and memory allocation for each virtual machine. NEXON also employs a security policy which requires that each of its services runs on a separate domain. On the existing virtual environment, it was not possible to build independent environments for multiple domains with hundreds of virtual machines on high-performance servers.”

As the IT department continued with its research into building a company-wide integrated test server infrastructure, it was finally given a chance to experience the latest all-in-one cloud OS technology. The department was presented with a proposal to participate in the Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) in which it could test out Windows Server 2012, which was about to be launched as an all-new cloud OS beyond the conventional concept of server operation. Having been given the opportunity to test the feasibility of building infrastructure not just for virtualization but also for a private cloud system, the IT department went ahead with the RDP

SolutionThe department wanted to verify just one thing in the Windows Server 2012 RDP. The IT department needed to conduct an empirical evaluation of high availability and scalability in order to overcome the inconvenience and inefficiency it encountered with conventional virtualization technologies. Firstly in high availability evaluation, NEXON’s IT department focused on the Replica and Shared Nothing Live Migration functions of Windows Server 2012. Various services were combined in NEXON’s virtualization environment, but the environment did not use high-cost SAN shared

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storage. As a result, it lacked backup and recovery solutions to ensure high availability. This was not to be overlooked. Backup and recovery may not be a critical issue for the development server, but servers for web services on NEXON.com definitely needed a safety net for unexpected problems. The IT department solved this issue by taking advantage of redundant hosting using L4 switching.

Having completed a backup and recovery system for high availability of the virtual environment with L4 switching, the IT department found the Replica function of Windows Server 2012 appealing. During the actual test, they learned that high availability could be obtained for the entire virtualization infrastructure without dedicated storage or dedicated backup and recovery solutions. The migration function also appealed. The IT department had first-hand experience of service interruption management when planned downtime was necessary for host maintenance, etc. even without shared storage capabilities. Also, with the replication function, guaranteeing high availability of the entire virtualization infrastructure became much easier.

In terms of scalability, the evaluation was focused on finding out what amount of resources could be allocated to virtual machines. Cho said, “Windows Server 2012 allows the allocation of up to 64 vCPUs per virtual machine. This means that virtualization can be applied to a wider range of applications. Windows Server 2008 R2 only supported up to 4 vCPUs, and VMWare only supported to up 32 vCPUs, and so we were hesitant to virtualize core servers. But now we don’t need to worry about performance and scalability.”

During the RDP, NEXON’s IT department also studied cost savings on storage in the virtual environment. In an attempt to test the Storage Space function of Windows Server 2012, they wanted to find out whether the iSCISI storage

laying idle in the office could be used with the disk on the host server as one shared storage pool. This enabled the department to find a solution to overcome the complexity of storage operation and management on a virtual server infrastructure consisting of many host servers. It also meant that significant cost savings could be achieved.

Benefits

Empirical Verification of the Cloud OS ConceptThrough the RDP, NEXON conducted empirical verification not just for virtualization but for the concept and function of cloud OS. This means that NEXON will be seeing a series of changes in its IT infrastructure. NEXON will gradually bring all the various virtualization servers using Hyper-V, VMWare, Xen, etc. together into its virtual cloud. Firstly, the company plans to start migrating the existing Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtual machines to the 2012 version environment. There is also a long-term plan to migrate the CentOS and Debian Linux virtual machines running on VMWare.

NEXON’s IT department plans to test running Linux on Hyper-V with BMT and then work on a gradual migration program if there are no performance and stability issues. Cho said, “When ESXi became free on VMWare in 2008, we expanded our business virtualization, mainly for the development servers. While ESXi doesn’t allow various virtualization technologies, Hyper-V allows us to use all functions without limits at equally low costs. Therefore, unless there are other reasons, we are going to move the development servers over to Windows Server 2012 as well.”

Having the Know-how to Build an Integrated Test ServerThe RDP gave the IT department confidence and assurance in building an integrated test server. The department had been studying various technologies for implementing the

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company-wide integrated test server infrastructure, which was the principal IT project for 2012. But after the RDP, the whole department agreed on using Hyper-V. Cho said, “We were undecided between Hyper-V and vSphere for achieving the effect of giving separate physical test servers to various development teams and, at the same time, handle the test demand on the same infrastructure from the IT department’s point of view. But through the Windows Server 2012 RDP, we settled on Hyper-V.”

What concerned the IT department most in building the integrated test server infrastructure was the network virtualization. Given the nature of the integrated test server infrastructure, which has to run hundreds of virtual machines and allow expansion of resources with the addition of new development projects, network virtualization technology was necessary to run a single integrated infrastructure while keeping management simple. The department had to use some trial and error in the virtual switching of Windows Server 2012 as it included a multi-tenant concept unlike existing virtual switching functions. But after some research, the department was able to build a virtual server infrastructure independent of network settings by locating various virtual switches on a subnet for each host.

More Stringent Pre-release Quality AssuranceBuilding the integrated test server infrastructure on a private cloud was highly significant for NEXON’s IT department. Compared to the private cloud, which was tested in the RDP for hosting development and some other web service servers, the new private cloud would be much larger and prove much more useful. So much emphasis is placed on the importance of the integrated test server infrastructure since it is directly related to customer satisfaction. For this reason, the IT department is currently considering adopting System Center 2012. Infrastructure administrators and the QA department are all

eagerly welcoming the use of Windows Server 2012 for the private cloud and System Center 2012.

Cho said, “We had the development team and the QA team work closely together from the planning stage of the integrated test server infrastructure. After we decided to use Windows Server 2012, it was suggested that we also use System Center so that performance bottlenecks could be identified in the testing stage using Application Performance Management (APM). The developers really loved the idea.” Everyone in operations and development welcomed System Center 2012 since it would not only allow transparent and rapid management of hundreds of virtual machines but also make it possible to perform tests on every aspect, from the end user environment to coding.

Technical Support Becomes Transparent Having used Windows Server 2012 for the private cloud running the development and some servers, web services and the company-wide integrated test server infrastructure, NEXON’s IT department expects the maintenance of virtualization technologies to become easier at corporate level. Should there be a fault, there is now no need to call separate solution providers for identifying causes and responding to network, virtualization, and OS issues. Cho said, “As we standardize the core virtual environment with the Hyper-V environment, one advantage we are seeing from the administrator’s point of view is that we only need to deal with one partner for maintenance and fault processing. For the Hyper-V environment, we only need to speak to Microsoft for support for OS, virtualization, and network. This definitely makes maintenance faster and easier.”

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Microsoft Server Product PortfolioFor more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:www.microsoft.com/servers

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For More InformationFor More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Nexon’s ervices, call 82-1588-7701 or visit the website at: www.nexon.com:

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published November 2012

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

− Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Edition