LL hit a hardware limit.

[Dancien]

Was gonna grab a region. I guess I will be waiting. And will happily pass on buying mainland

 

[Noodles]

When I first read the title my brain interpreted it as they had used a sixteen bit index for regions or something dumb like that. No, they actually literally ran out of hardware.

I was wondering if they were actually moving regions to the cloud. I figured it would be the hardest part, since the regions are already basically a private proprietary cloud.

And so far I guess they haven't figured it out yet.

They have been moving a lot of our work stuff to "the cloud" at work. As near as I can tell, it means taking our own company private cloud, and putting it inside someone else's cloud. The idea being to get rid of "white floor space", which is expensive to maintain.

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Time to fire up some more Hyper-V instances?

Or, like Free said, to the cloud!

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

They have been moving a lot of our work stuff to "the cloud" at work. As near as I can tell, it means taking our own company private cloud, and putting it inside someone else's cloud. The idea being to get rid of "white floor space", which is expensive to maintain.

At my last job we worked on moving as many servers as we could to the cloud and ended up largely pulling back... it would have cost way more than the savings from even shutting the whole thing down, unless we wanted to radically reduce the performance delivered to our developers and testers (who were always calling for upgrades as it is). Some of the hardware moved with no problem because they were serving much more conventional requirements.

Linden Lab has a similar situation, I suspect. Asset servers and other systems that are effectively webservers can move easily. The simulators will require more work to make them cloud-friendly.

 

[Sid]

The simulators will require more work to make them cloud-friendly.

One can leave that to the LL without any worries.
They are superb when it comes to new implementations.

What?

 

[Innula Zenovka]

I thought they migrated their hosting to Amazon or something. Can't they spin up on demand servers?

As the blog post explains,

As we’ve discussed previously, Second Life is in the process of migrating from our existing dedicated servers to a cloud hosting service. That migration has already moved a number of the most important services and databases, but we are not quite ready to host simulators in the cloud. We have a crack team working on that and are making lots of progress, but there are significant changes needed to make sure that we can provide the performance, stability, and security required. When that process is complete we will have a nearly unlimited region capacity, but until then we are constrained by the size of our existing server fleet.

While our migration project has been underway for some time, even our most optimistic business projections did not anticipate a surge of the magnitude we have seen in recent weeks for additional regions. While we planned for growth driven by improvements to Second Life and other factors, we didn't expect demand to be created by a global pandemic.

As a result, we are in the unfortunate position of hitting the maximum capacity of our “old” servers until the “new” cloud servers are fully operational.

Limited Availability of New Second Life Regions

Due to the ongoing public health crisis, we’ve experienced an unprecedented surge in demand for new Second Life regions. While we are thrilled by the heightened interest, the increased demand has consumed our available inventory of full regions. Read the details in the following post: Have any qu...

community.secondlife.com

That is, they're still in the process of migrating to the cloud and the unexpected growth in business because of the pandemic meant they ran though their remaining server space a lot more quickly than expected.

 

[Eunoli]

The thing is that as the economy continues to tank, lots of sims are going to go under - especially if they don't drastically reduce tier. Before spinning anything new up, they have to be taking that into consideration.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Was gonna grab a region. I guess I will be waiting. And will happily pass on buying mainland

You can always try buying one that's no longer wanted by the owner -- that's what I've always done and paid for it to be renamed and moved if necessary -- generally far cheaper than paying the set-up fee for a new one.

 

[Noodles]

At my last job we worked on moving as many servers as we could to the cloud and ended up largely pulling back... it would have cost way more than the savings from even shutting the whole thing down, unless we wanted to radically reduce the performance delivered to our developers and testers (who were always calling for upgrades as it is). Some of the hardware moved with no problem because they were serving much more conventional requirements.

Linden Lab has a similar situation, I suspect. Asset servers and other systems that are effectively webservers can move easily. The simulators will require more work to make them cloud-friendly.

Yeah, there are a lot of things with work I don't get. One, it doesn't affect what I do, but they are talking about proprietary customer data and all that a lot. Feels like something they would want to keep in house. Maybe they are. Two, they were moving some stuff we use internally I think. Except the corporate LAN is fucking awful. Like, 1mbps DSL awful. We run like half the damn internet, our corporate LAN should be awesome. Third, for a while there was all this talk about building and being a competitor to stuff like Amazon and Microsoft for providing Cloud as a service or whatever. I don't see that happening if it's all hosted on someone else's cloud. They have not talked about that in a few years anyway. Also, going back a bit, I am pretty sure we run a lot fo the internet backbone for the country, if not everywhere, we should be able to host out own cloud servers for ourselves and everyone and they should be super fast an accessible. But the corporate execs don't seem to want to be in the service business anymore, it's all "entertainment" that's probably going to go nowhere like the Cloud Services thing did.

Anyway, I'm ranting and bitching about work now.

 

[Val]

I would not mind buying out the mainland sim we are on as we are almost on half of it now as we cannot afford to pay for a full sim. However, I assume the lease still would be 200 quid which is a tad bit too much. I am not very surprised SL is running out of current space with server move as there is a lot of abandoned sims and I had a secret rezzing spot before renting anything for years on one of those (and I could build there, hah). It still is there, in fact. They should restructure the whole thing for full optimisation but I don't think they can without moving assets for users or users themselves.

 

[Andi]

Time to fire up some more Hyper-V instances?

Or, like Free said, to the cloud!

They use a modifyied debian install which runs a custom vm solution they spun up to host each sim with.

 

[Benjamin Opel]

I just checked the land store to see if they're open and ready to accept orders and it appears as if they're still out of stock of the regions - which is great news for the SL economy..

 

[Andi]

I just checked the land store to see if they're open and ready to accept orders and it appears as if they're still out of stock of the regions - which is great news for the SL economy..

I think you are not getting whats going on, they are physically out of floor space at the data center, they ran out of hardware, there is no space to put anything even if they wanted.

 

[Benjamin Opel]

I think you are not getting whats going on, they are physically out of floor space at the data center, they ran out of hardware, there is no space to put anything even if they wanted.

Oh... I may of missed that part - I thought they couldn't acquire any more servers due to demand - I didn't know it was a physical issue.