From the EQ2 Forums:
The Butcherblock server will be offline on Tuesday, August 16, starting at 12:00 AM PDT for an estimated downtime of 24 hours. This maintenance is being completed for server hardware upgrades.
From the EQ2 Forums:
The Butcherblock server will be offline on Tuesday, August 16, starting at 12:00 AM PDT* for an estimated downtime of 24 hours. This maintenance is being completed for server hardware upgrades.
Time Zone Report:
Server Upgrades must be getting sufficiently routine for the EQ2 and Network Operations teams such that posting a Status Report or two completely slipped their minds. Players, however, wanted to know: Was Unrest actually upgraded?
According to Rothgar, it was:
The upgrades were definitely made so you should be seeing improvements.
SmokeJumper elaborated:
Unrest is definitely upgraded already.
All servers except for Butcherblock and Storms have been upgraded now.
Butcherblock will be upgraded on the 16th of August.
There isn’t an ETA for Storms yet. I’ll post one when we get the date nailed down.
Rothgar had a comment regarding Bazaar and Vox as well:
The Bazaar is using a dynamic pool of servers that have been upgraded. This goes for Vox as well, so there should be some improvements for sure.
Not sure how we missed this, but from EverQuest2.com…
The Unrest, Guk and Everfrost servers will be offline on Tuesday, August 2, starting at 2:00 AM PDT for an estimated downtime of 6 hours. This maintenance is being completed for server hardware upgrades.
That’s…
From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:
Just an update to let you know that maintenance is scheduled for Splitpaw tonight at 9pm PST for hardware upgrades.
This information is not exactly a secret, but it’s a question that comes up often. Where is your EQ2 server located? Thanks to Rothgar for the list which we supplemented.
Servers on the west coast [San Diego] include:
- Guk
- Everfrost
- Antonia Bayle (RP)
- Unrest
- Butcherblock
- Nagafen (PvP)
- Vox (PvP RG)
- The Bazaar (RG)
- Freeport (EQ2X)
- Sebilis (JP)
East Coast includes:
- Permafrost
- Oasis
- Crushbone
Our European [Amsterdam] data center includes:
- Valor (German)
- Storms (French)
- Splitpaw (UK)
- Barren Sky (Russian)
- Harla Dar (Russian)
SmokeJumper has posted some time estimates for the server upgrades (which may naturally change based on circumstances) on the EQ2 Forums. I believe this includes Guk, Everfrost, Unrest, Butcherblock, Valor, and Splitpaw.
Hey, folks,
Just a quick update to let you know when the hardware upgrades are scheduled to happen.
Amsterdam and Valor should be upgraded in about two weeks from now (end of the month).
The remaining servers will get upgraded about two weeks beyond that. It’d be great to have everything upgraded by Fan Faire, but we might miss it by a week or so.
Soon!(tm)
A surprising post from SmokeJumper yesterday caught our attention regarding New Hardware:
The server hardware is coming in in chunks as we ship it to the various data centers around the world.
But the good news is…Permafrost and Oasis are now upgraded, as of this morning.
More are coming soon!
We’ve already received indication that the rest of the hardware is already on order. Russian servers will not be upgraded as the hardware is relatively new (2007) while the current EQ2 servers were on 2004 hardware. Note these are the game servers and zone servers. The database servers were already upgraded late last summer to new 64-bit hardware.
From SmokeJumper on the EQ2 Forums:
I don’t have the ETA yet, but we are making the purchases and we’ll get the hardware replaced on the servers that have not yet been upgraded (Guk, Everfrost, Unrest, Butcherblock, Permafrost, Oasis, and Splitpaw).
It’ll take some time to get these changes implemented (takes a while to order them, get them delivered, and then installed at the various data centers), but we’ll update you with details when we know more.
They’re coming!
I’ve finally managed to escape Charles de Gaulle airport which completely ground to a halt due to 3 inches (7cm) of snow. Meanwhile, our SAS pilot made a perfect landing in near whiteout conditions with heavy snowfall on a runway and at an airport positively blanketed with snow. Ah… Copenhagen… 😉
Anyway, ’bout those server merges…
We first heard about Server Mergers in an initial announcement in October. The first possible date for the merges was put forth as November 16th. As revealed by SOE’s answers to some questions about Server Merges by EQ2 ZAM on November 8th, 2010, SOE aren’t simply using the same old Server Merge scripts which have been used in the past. It seems more attention is being paid to make sure there is less work for players, and less issues for Customer Service as well.
With the migration of Nagafen server last week and today’s moving day for Antonia Bayle complete, we should now see whether the new servers finally vanquish the lag monster.
Rothgar is seeking player feedback on the server upgrade and, if the move proves successful, we will hopefully see the migration of all servers to new hardware.
With this morning’s maintenance, Antonia Bayle received some new hardware which should greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the lag you’ve been experiencing. We will be monitoring the new hardware and phasing out the old hardware over time.
Please share your experiences with us.
There has been a lot of anger towards the new Free-to-Play service. Not the least of which has been from players currently on existing servers that continue to struggle with lag. Thus far, we’ve heard that Free-to-Play will be launching with one server initially from an existing stock of decommissioned servers, with other servers to follow, possibly old EQ2 servers as they are upgraded to new hardware. In mid August, the Antonia Bayle and Nagafen worlds will find themselves within the comfy confines of a brand new server.
This week’s rollup post includes news about Antonia Bayle server upgrades, some out-of-whack procs, and further speculation about Free-to-Play (F2P).
After the jump…
From the EQ2 Forums:
Starting at 4:45am PDT on Tuesday, June 29, 2010, the Guk, Najena and Blackburrow servers will come down for an estimated 5 1/2-hour downtime, expected to be online again around 9:15am PDT. During this time the servers will be undergoing maintenance.
We apologize for any inconvenience. If any additional downtime is needed, we will update this post accordingly.
At 11pm PDT on June 9th, 2010 (7am GMT on June 10th, 2010), several EQ2 servers were brought down for maintenance:
Befallen, Permafrost, Crushbone, Mistmoore, Oasis, Runnyeye, Splitpaw, Innovation, Valor, Storms, Battlegrounds UK, Battlegrounds DE, and Battlegrounds FR
The original announcement indicated that maintenance would take 7 hours. All servers were up after ~13 hours, with a total downtime of ~15 hours for Runnyeye, Innovation, and some of the Battlegrounds servers.
So what was this maintenance all about? And did it include the US-UK Battlegrounds bridging we’ve been hearing about?
From the EQ2 Forums:
Crushbone, Befallen, and Permafrost will be brought down Friday morning for some upgrades to address the lag issues.
The estimated downtime is four hours.
We’ll be bringing down the servers at 6am PST and will update this thread with details as needed.
Rothgar has been communicating what steps the server team have been taking with regards to this issue. You may be interested in some of those details he’s posted, after the jump.