Virtual Windows 8 ... Sort of.

OK, I know there are people there that love Windows 8, and those that don't really like it.  I am not going to debate that here, but lets say, I need to advance with the times because of my job and will use Windows 8, and try to get the most out of it

Having said that, I work with servers, so my main system is Windows 2012.  Now on first look Windows 2012 looks a lot like Windows 8, so why cannot my Windows 2012 system also be my Windows 8 system.  Now I don't want a completely transformed OS, but try to get the best of both worlds.  So here are the things that I did to my system and hopefully guide you on your transformation.  And for why I did this, I can say only 1 thing: I want to play Halo: Spartan Strike on my computer along with my phone.

Add the Desktop Experience

This is a straight forward process, just adding a feature called 'Desktop Experience'  If you need directions on how to add this web site has it.

Please remember in order you use the Windows App store, you need a Microsoft account, and your logon account cannot be administrator.

Install Halo: Spartan Strike

Go to the Windows store and install it.  Now this application is not free, and for some reason I could not purchase it within the application store, but I used my phone to purchase because it is a single purchase for phone and desktop, so once that was done, it installed fine on Windows 2012

Issue with running app and Xinput1_4.dll

Halo: Spartan Strike installed, but when it ran I was getting an Xinput1_4.dll error, and it bombed out.  I found better description of the error here, and then another page that comes with files and an install script

The script is straight forward and comes with 6 files.  Now I normally don't trust these files especially since they are not signed, and I didn't want to expose my system to any unscrupulous files, so I built a Virtual Windows 8, and extracted the same files to install into my 2012 system.  I did compare my files to the downloaded files, and they were same on the binary level, but better safe than sorry.

Once those files were added the program worked fine, and I am hoping that all other DirectX games will also behave as well.

Issue with keyboard - Halo: Spartan Strike

Now the program is running but for some reason, the mouse works, but the keyboard does not.  For me fixing that is a simple solution.  My system has PS/2 keyboard and mouse, so I just add my  USB wireless Logitech K400 keyboard, now the game works!!!

Better Gaming experience - Xbox 360 Game controller

I have a working game, but using the keyboard is a little kludgey because the key choices are chosen and you cannot change them, also with the AWSD to move, it is a little choppy.

So I picked up a used Rock Candy controller.  It plugged in fine, but didn't work.  Went to the vendor's web site, pdp.com and they state the controller is for Xbox 360, so there are no drivers for windows.

Well not being discourage, went looking for a driver for a Microsoft Xbox 360 drivers from Microsoft and found them here.

Installed the driver, rebooted, and the controller worked fine. It plays like a dream and now I can spend all of my time killing the Covenant!!

I hope my work will enable you to play this game with Windows 2012, and your system primed to play other games from Windows Store.

Success in improving RAID speeds

After a long and hard trial process, I have increased the speed of my RAID5 array on an IBM ServeRAID-6M to a very acceptable level

Before I worked on this, guests on a 5 disk RAID5 were getting 5MB/s and after-wards I am getting the following Speeds

• Windows 2003, 12GB, Read tests with HD_speed are 92 MB/s
• Ubuntu 9.04 server, 8GB Read+Write tests, using dd are 32 MB/s

My second RAID was only 3 disks because I had a problem with 2 of the disks. Here are my suggestions for building a RAID5 from used parts

• Test the READ and WRITE speeds of each disk by itself. I had 1 U320 disk that was reading fine at 60 MB/s but crippled down and would only write at 5 MB/s
• Have the same interface; one disk was a U160, and it could only read at 50 MB/s
• Do not include any disks that are considerably slower than others, it will slow down the whole array.
• Not sure this is true with all Array controllers, but make sure that both the disks and the array are set to write back, not write through. Also the setting for the disks can only be change while they are not in an array, and cannot be change once they are built into an array

These are my preferences, and not sure they will affect anything.

• When building the array use the largest stripe size. The ServeRAID-6M goes up to 64K
• When formatting the VMFS Datastore choose a larger block size like 4MB or 8MB.
  

Improving SCSI performance on ESXi Whitebox

OK, the upgrade to SCSI went well, I converted from a SATA to SCSI system.

Added the following components:

• IBM ServeRAID 6M, PCI-X card
• 1 36GB drive to use as boot, and ISO storage
  
• 5 74GB drives in RAID5 to be used as main datastore (272 GB)
• 1 500GB SATA drive from old ESXi Server. Source Datastore to move data onto RAID5

Now everything was going well, but was noticing that the speed performance was slow. Now I expected it to be slower with writes on RAID5, but I was expecting the reads to scream.

That was not what was happening. So I started using HD_Speed and noticed some things.

• Read speed on SATA drives 115
• Read Speed on SCSI RAID5 4.5

That was a big difference. So I did some digging and did the following changes to make some improvements

• Moved the ServerRAID 6M to PCI-X slot 1 because it was 133 Mhz, Removed the other SCSI card because if there was anything in Slot 2, it downgrade to 100 Mhz and the card was only rated at 133.
• Made sure that the Cache was on
• Upped the queue limit from 64 to 96 into the BIOS

After I did that the Read speed moved up to 45. Not bad. One other thing that I noticed is that when you move to larger downloads like 4MB it would move up to the 100 to 200 range.

Also I could benchmark 2 servers simultaneously from the SCSI RAID5 and it did not impact each other.