I have a few questions, first off does anyone know how good of a server I would need to host dedicated servers for gaming, which OS works best for gaming and how good of a dedicated server would I need. I was looking at this Dual Xeon Dell poweredge server 3.2GHz, 2 gigs ram, 5 146gb SCSI 10,000rpm hard drives.

5 146gb scsi drives?:eek2: :eek4: :gone:

I think what is important here is to find out which OS are the particular game servers you are interested to run are developed for.

If it is written only in Linux then you have no choice but to go with Linux or if it is written only in Windows then you have to use Windows.

Yeah, there are 5 hard drives in the server. Each hard drive is 146gb SCSI 10k-rpm

Do you actually need that much space though?
Fedora is ok for gaming but you may want to try FreeBSD

Yeah, I was told freeBSD would be good for this but I wanted more opinions before I jumped onto this. Well, I need the extra space for more servers I would like to run seriously

I think you will run out of proccessing power and resources before you run out of space. Most games average about 500MB to 1-2GB, with the space you have got you would be running hundreds of game server software of one box, which comes back to what i said. Why do you need so much disk space? If it is just to fill it up with game servers you will have some real issues with lag and maybe even crashes if every server is full or even semi-full.

OS is dependant on the game you want to host. Some developers do not provide linux versions of the server software. So you need to decide which games you wish to host then do some research on whether there is a linux version of the server software. Another point is that some games just do not like linux, very few but there are some that run better on a windows machine even though there is a linux version.

Totally pointless to have that many hdd's. I am positive that ut2003 and ut2004 and UT all work the same way (i run them before). You only need 1 set of files (1-2GB's) then each server you run gets a different config file for each seprate game server you put up. Just a note but if you wanna run a halo server you will have to use windows.

Finally a thread I can contribute to :)

I owned/ran an Internet Game Center up until a year and a half ago and the previous poster is correct, space is not going to be the real issue because every game server I have every configured only required one installation regardless of the number of servers running.

With that much processing power, your real issue is going to be bandwidth. You might also have issues with IP/Ports because each server for each game is going to want to run on it's own Port and, depending on the number of servers per game, that could get real confusing real quick (this could be mitigated a bit by using multiple IP's).

Your REAL biggest problem is going to be keeping all the wall hack/cheater/smacktards off your servers :)

Your best bet in this regard is to reward frequent players that exhibit good playing habits with (game) admin rights (not to be confused with OS Admin rights).

Also, although I'm probably speaking to a Linux audience, you should probably stick to Windows for OS if you can because, if you don't, you will have MANY issues related to "we should be releasing the latest update for Linux soon". There's pluses and minuses for each side but we abandoned the "Linux Game Server" idea way back during original Tribes because Linux releases/fixes/etc trailed Windows too much.

Good luck

I like Linux game servers for a number of reasons, but for a 'just works' gaming solution, you will have better luck with Windows. I'm not sure what that crazy disk space is all about. Maybe he's doing something turn-based, where CPU won't be driven as much -- he hasn't really specified.

I would recommend Debian or FreeBSD. Many people have asked the "What OS should I use?" question, a search will help. If you're going to put some money into the HD, I would recommend a single 36 GB SCSI 10,000 or 15,000 RPM HD, or maybe 73 GB, but definitely not five 146 GB drives for game server hosting.