Alienware M17x SSD (SATA III) RAID

After the past several days troubleshooting blue screens in Windows 7on my brand new Alienware M17x R3 machine. I've determined that there is a bug when trying to configure two SATA III SSD drives (OWC Mercury Extreme Pro) or two OCZ Vertex 3 SATA III SSD drives in a RAID configuration. However, I can successfully configure these drives in a non-RAID AHCI format. I can also configured two Seagate Momentus XT (SSD Hybrid) successfully drives in a RAID configuration so I know that RAID works with non-SSD drives. There are a number of forum posts on sites such as Notebook Review with people having similar problems with the Alienware M17x R3 so this is not unique to my computer! Also to set the record straight there was a problem with one of my OWC 6G drives, I tried reconfiguring the RAID when I received the replacement drive. Out of 6 drives only two (non-SSD) drives worked.

Currently I have an SSD boot with a 500GB drive used for data, there was a specific method of installing the drivers from Dell. I will post the procedure here very soon! 

Update on Saturday, October 8, 2011 at 11:33AM by David G (Chuzpah)

After using my SATA III configuration for a few months now and I'm still getting some random BSOD issues with IRQ_LESS_THAN_EQUAL messages. I've decided to rip out the SATA III SSD and run 2 Seagate Momentus XTs instead in RAID 0 mode. This configuration is very acceptable and my system boots in 28.3 seconds! 

Mango is Coming

Yesterday Microsoft officially announced the next version of the Windows Phone 7 software. Communications and more interactivity on tiles, integration with Twitter and LinkedIn is now available on the tile view (very cool)! Here are some of the highlights that I took away from the press release.

• Group communication looks cool
• Visual voicemail is very cool, soon my Windows Phone will be like my old iPhone!
• Threads looks cool
• E-mail is getting better (one of the reasons I bought this phone in the first place)!

One of the best features of this phone has been the integration with Facebook and Windows Live, in Mango everything looks better in this regard.

Also, another observation! I could not view the press conference on my Samsung Windows Phone 7, hopefully Mango will have built-in Silverlight. I'm going to view the press conference again to make sure that I did not miss anything. In any case I'm glad to see that Microsoft is finally giving the Windows Phone some much needed love!

Cool New Games coming to Windows Phone

The phone advantage that iPhone users have had with an iPhone is the amount of cool names available on that platform. Now that is going to change for us Windows Phone users. There are a number of games that are going to be released in the coming weeks. While I'm not much of a phone gamer I do like the following games and look forward to adding them to my Windows Phone collection. Hopefully more will follow now that Microsoft is releasing free iOS conversion tools. 

• Plants vs Zombies (coming June 22nd) - One of my favorite games on the iPhone
• Angry Birds (coming June 29th)
• Doodle Jump (coming June 1st)

For more information see the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Blog, it can be found here!

Running Hyper-V on a 2010 8-Core Mac Pro

Mac Pro has the following specs:

• 2 - 2.4Ghz Quad Core processors (16 virtual cores)
• 32GB of RAM
• 3 - 1TB Western Digital Cavier Black HDs
• 1 - 2TB Western Digital Cavier Black HD
• 30 inch cinema display (2560 x 1600)

I've had my 2010 8-core (duel 2.4 GHZ) Mac Pro for a few weeks now and the performance running Regular Mac Apps (including VMware Fusion has been great. However, I thought it was time to take it to the next level and put my TechNet Professional subscription to good use by running a true (type 1) hypervisor since Fusion seems to get unresponsive after using 16GB of RAM. 

Installation was a fairly painless, I used the Apple Boot Camp assistant to create a 700GB partition for the Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64) Enterprise installation on the stock 1TB Western Digital Hard Drive. Installed the operating system, installed the Apple Boot Camp drivers, downloaded OS operating system hotfixes and SP1 for 2008 Server then I was ready to rock! 

After enabling the Hyper-V role I was ready to create virtual machines. I decided to create a new lab using 30 day evaluation licenses for this test because I did not want to waste all of my TechNet activations with this test (even the host) so I decided to not activate anything and 30 days is more than enough time to play! 

One of the first tests I decided to do was create at least 10 virtual machines at the same time. I expected a fair amount of disk thrashing so I also used another disk for half of the virtual machines. This served me well and I ceased to have any disk performance problems once I started using another disk. Hyper-V makes good use of all available cores and memory, I had good system performance during my unscientific 10 virtual machine build. I continued this process until i had 21 virtual machines built with a mixture of Windows 2008, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 2003 R2, Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Vista. Running several server side applications such as Exchange Server 2003, 2007, OCS 2007 R2 (IM and Presence). Currently in the process of introducing Lync Server 2010 and Exchange 2010. 

Since my Hyper-V server is not a member of a domain I did not install System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. I will install this later when I decide to build my Hyper-V server again! My next test with the Mac Pro is to install VMware ESXi 4.1 on the Mac Pro. Since I already have another ESX host I can simply move some of the VMs over and use my templates to build additional machines. Eventually I would like to get another server class machine (such as a Dell Poweredge) and have a permanent ESXi server. 

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions please post comments here!

The 30 MB barrier

Since switching from a Kindle to an iPad for reading my experience has been very good for the most part but reading some PDFs sometimes a challenge due to the limits of the iPad. For example, the iPad cannot open a file larger than 30MB! This is a problem for me since I often get PDF versions of books that accompany the printed version, not being able to open them up in iBooks or PDFReader Pro is bad because I need to lug around the thick printed copy (how quaint)!

I have gotten around the 30MB limitation with my own documents by printing half of a book to a PDF file. While this is not ideal it does the job. However, it still does not solve the problem of getting a PDF file from a published book. Another option is to buy a kindle edition of the book. This is not a desirable option because I do not get a printed copy of the book as well. While reading novels is great on the Kindle App I still prefer a printed copy of a technical book! However, I have purchased technical books from the Kindle store when I needed something quickly!

Best of both Worlds

Since I also have a Safari Books subscription I have found the Safari App an interesting alternative. The only problem that I have seen is that some books get truncated in strange areas. For example, when reading Mike Laverick’s VMware vSphere 4 Implementation book I noticed some problems with viewing some of the pages. I was in a Borders at the time so I strolled over to the computer book section and compared both print and the Safari Books online versions and sure enough the LAB sections were cut off in the Safari App. Soon after that I reported the problem to Safari. Another good feature about the Safari Books Online iPad App is the ability to cache books for offline use. I had mixed results, if you navigate away or let the iPad sleep is stops the downloading process! This is best done in a high-speed environment (not in an Airport lounge)!