and on the E-tso blog he stated this which is the long winded version of the above, however it spells out much better how things will be handled in the weeks to come.
We’ve got a bunch of stuff to talk about regarding cities shutting down, moves (a.k.a. bullet trains), and merges. We figure you need this infomation to make informed decisions about managing your sims and their data. First, let’s go over (the important stuff) the schedule over the next few days:
AV, BF, CC, DG, EJ, FF, IH, JP, MF, DC will be shutting down permanently today (February 21, 2008) at 2 P.M. PST.
Monday or Tuesday (February 25 or 26, 2008) we will perform the first city merge. However, it may NOT be East Jerome (as previously decided). Instead, it will be Dragon’s Cove. (see background below).
Merges will continue until all cities are completed. There will be a pause for other work.
As you might have guessed, the order of merges may need to be adjusted slightly.
Betaville Sims may be eligible to move shortly, however, it might be sims only (no objects, houses, or simoleans). We will be running tests internally over the next few days.
Monday, March 3, 2008 at 8:00 A.M. PST. Test Center 3 will go offline for a data center migration. We expect the down to be between 2-4 hours.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008 at 8:00 A.M. PST. EA-Land will go offline for a data center migration. This will happen only if the data migration for Test Center 3 is okay.
Background
The cities for EA-Land and TSO are divided into two data centers: one located on the U.S. east coast and the other on the U.S. west coast. The cities are currently divided as follows:
East Coast: AV, BF, CC, DG, EJ, FF, BV (and the original TC)
West Coast: IH, JP, DC, MF, EA-Land, and TC3.
Without going into the “why’s” and the “what for’s,” by April 1, 2008 we need to look like this:
East Coast: EA-Land, Test Center3
West Coast: none.
Merges
Mark, Paul, and others on the team have been working very hard to get the merges working. We think we are ready. However, in final tests we discovered data transfers between East Jerome (currently on the east coast) and EA-Land (currently on the west coast) took 8-10 times our internal testing timings. We think this is because of the need to transfer the data across the country. What should take less than a few hours, is 8-10 times slower per city. To put this in perspective, biggers cities would be measured in 5-10 days. Today we are running tests between Dragon’s Cove (west coast) to EA-Land (west coast), if our timing tests match our previous good tests then we will proceed with Dragon’s Cove.
If you recall the previous order of merges was:
EJ, DG, CC, AV, DC, IH, FF, JP, BF, MF, BV (bolded cities are west coast)
Instead next week, and next week only, we will merge the west coast cities (DC, IH, JP, and MF). However, we will merge only one city at time and make sure evertything is okay before proceeding to the next. That means we may only get Dragon’s Cove done and no other west coast city.
We then begin the migration of Test Center 3 and EA-Land to the east coast. During this time, behind the scenes we are migrating the other west coast cities (DC, IH, JP, and MF) to the East Coast.
Once EA-Land is safely in it’s new home, we will resume the merges. Only then we will be on the east coast so we will go back to the original list, i.e., East Jerome will be first up.
While all the above is happening, one or two members of the team will be walking around mumbling, writing on white-boards, occasionally typing code and running tests regarding the Betaville sims. Meaning, they will be trying to figure out why we got Sim guy heads stuck on pets or Sim gals without heads at all, and figuring out how to fix it.
The minimum we will provide for Betaville is Sim only moves. We will be looking at the move and merge code to see if there are ways of modifying it for Betaville. Hopefully more to come regarding that.
Conclusion
TSO legacy cities will be shutting down at 2
o P.M. PST today permanantly. Trains will resume after this time.
Until we have EA-Land safely in its new east coast home, we will proceed to merge west coast cities in the following order: DC, IH, JP, MF
Once EA-Land is transfered to the east coast, the original randomized merge order will be resumed.
Betaville remains a work in progress, and we are doing everything possible to merge as much as possible to EA-Land.
hope this answers your questions
