Downtime on Thursday, November 14th

Since last time

In case anyone has been wondering why there has been very little news from us lately, it is because we have spent the past several weeks preparing the site and our servers for the launch of the new match simulator.

Way back in 2007, before we even released Virtualmanager outside of Denmark, we rolled out Vman 2.0, and switched from our old text-based match engine to the one we have today.

During that time, match simulation was a total disaster in the first week, with matches being delayed several days - and for several months afterwards, breakdowns and delays were almost a daily occurrence.

This time around, we are making every effort to avoid another disaster like that. But, that means our progress has been very slow, since we have to be extremely cautious in everything we do.

In addition, our servers are running very old versions of their operating systems, which means that they have been resisting all of our attempts to update various software and install tools that could make the whole process easier. This has given us quite a few grey hairs.

Large scale match simulator test and server upgrades

Our plan, going forward, is to let the new match simulator run an entire season's league matches as a test for at least 1 week, next to the old one. This will ensure that our systems can handle the pressure, and that everything works according to plan.

Don't worry, though, all of the injuries, suspensions, energy losses, points, etc., obtained in the additional matches will NOT be saved, and will not have any impact on the game at all.

In order to pull off this giant test season, we have had to borrow an additional server for match simulation, and our database will have its disk space doubled, to make room for matches from both the old and the new match simulator at the same time.

Downtime

So far we have been able to avoid downtime, but on Thursday we'll have to shut down the site to complete the database disk space expansion.

Therefore, the site will go offline on Thursday the 14th of November, at approx. 06:30 GMT . After we shut the site down, we'll take a complete backup before we start fiddling with the database, which will add about an hour and a half to the entire process. We expect to open again around 11:00 GMT.

• All auctions that are set to end during this period will be extended by 4 hours.

• All league matches schedule to be played during this period have already been moved.

After the upgrade

When the upgrade is complete, we will monitor the site intensively to ensure that everything has gone well.

Once that has been established, we will upload the latest version of the new match simulator which has had injuries and substitutions implemented, as well as numerous small changes and optimizations.

Then we'll start working on getting the new server ready to simulate matches, so that we can begin the large scale test season as soon as possible. More info on this will follow later.