Scale your chain

Let’s pretend you have a bot, running fine, and let’s pretend you want to add 2-3 bots and create a chain.

How do you accommodate the bots on new machines? For newby, this is a core question (more advanced users, please move on :-) ) .

My first experience, back in 2006, was to purchase a second-hand personal computer for each bot and control them via a single monitor and a single keyboard via a KVM switch. In 2006, that was almost the only solution available, since no personal computer was powerful enough to run 2 instances of Magic Online and 2 copies of ML Bot. Also, I was able to purchase a second hand computer on eBay for 200-300 usd, reasonably a good price. If you have old computers, rather than throw them away, use them coupled with a KVM switch.

Nowadays, instead, you can buy a powerful server-class pc, with 8-16 gb of memory, for less than 1000 usd. With it, you could run 4-10 bots, enough to expand your chain. The secret is create virtual machines “in” the computer. Each virtual machine will have its own virtual hardware (a portion of the real processor, a portion of the ram, a portion of the hard-drive and so on). There are several virtualization softwares available, most notably VmWare, VirtualBox and VirtualPC. These are free software, you can easily obtain them online.

With one of them strapped on your belt, you have to create a virtual machine for each of your bots. When choosing the virtual hardware, I suggest at least 1 gb of ram for each machine (2 will be perfect). Install a  copy of Windows XP on each virtual machine, and then a copy of Magic Online and a copy of ML Bot (in fact you could create a single virtual machine and “copy-paste” it).

A second solution is to rent a (Windows) virtual machine from dedicated companies. There are several ones, for instance goDaddy. A virtual machines costs 25-35 usd per month, and is sufficient to run an instance of ML Bot. Doing so, you won’t pay the electricity bill, and won’t have to deal with broken hardware, failures, VmWare or other virtualization softwares.