For those of you reading this through facebook, my post title will make no sense – head on over to http://www.groundtactics.com/2010/08/27/noticed-my-avatar/ to see what I mean.

Yes, I’m a worms fan.  If you don’t know what worms is, then don’t bother with this article.  Worms Reloaded is out.  Team17 has taken the franchise from 3D back to it’s 2D roots and wow…  Proof that 3D is NOT always better.  The 3D worms games were great and all, but nothing compares to the original 2D chaos.  Having a modern version of that is just awesome.

So here’s my mini review:

What I like:

• JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING from all the years of worming through the original 2D games through the 3D games is here.
• Simplest network multiplayer support ever.  Past worms games were always tough to get working right over the internet.  Not so with the latest masterpiece.
• All of the classic speech banks are back along with new spinoffs of the same
• New weapons (lots)
• 3D accented graphics (nifty backgrounds and special effects)
• HD resolution support

What I don’t like:

• Lan play missing?  I don’t like this new trand game devs are taking.
• Only 4 worms per team (Worms Armageddon supported up to 8 )
• I can’t seem to mix CPU players into hosted games.
• VOIP support turned on by default (annoying when not using headphones).
• I can’t have two teams on one PC connected to two teams on a remote PC.  (Worms world party allowed this).

Would I recommend it?  Hell yes! 

Final thoughts:  For a game like this, lan play isn’t all that important since if you’re going to play it at a lan party you might as well just use hotseat mode.  As for 4 worms per team, it just makes for faster matches.  Voip issues are resolved for me by unplugging all recording devices from my PC during a game.  I seem to be at a loss for words on adding a hotseater/cpu player to internet games though – maybe they’ll patch that in later.

I was a huge fan of the first one and think fondly back to epic 8 hour lan party battles.  Yes, I know the sequel does not have lan play but I also enjoyed the single player campaign.  I’m sure I’ll get my ass handed to me in online play but I’ve just got to get this game on principle.  So as I’m writing this, the game is downloading to my PC via purchase online through Blizzard.

I’ll probably update this after I’ve played a bit.

The image of sheer joy (for the moment):

 - moved back into house (not on the market anymore so no more need to stage it).
 - remembered the pain of $800 monthly con-ed bills (Damn central air..)
 - redid my home office
 - my dog died
 - my great aunt died
 - my grandmother turned 98
 - my daughter turned 2
 - my birthday came a week before hers, but somehow hers still came first. 
 - helped my younger bro move to his apt
 - helped my younger bro get his car
 - tons of work at the office
 - got a new pc (6 core intel i7, 12gb ram, 2tb hd, geforce 480, 27inch monitor)
 - got new furniture
 - got a new laptop
 - cleaned out my garage
 - updated my servers
 - started teaching myself sharepoint
 - helped my younger bro get a cushy office job
 - my wife got a bad ear infection
 - various holiday events I wanted nothing to do with but somehow got involved in.

So I send a “WHASSUP!?!” to everybody and apologize for holidays/birthdays/occasions/events/marriages/whatever I may have missed.  I’ll probably still be very busy with real life for a while to come, but I haven’t forgotten you all.  Take care!

To start off, I’ll share my bad experiences:

The worst of all were the stability issues I had.  Everybody speaks up and down to how stable Hyper-V is..  That may be true, but it sure wasn’t the case for me.  The system I installed it on would constantly hard lock every time I tried to move some significant amount of data.  Whether it was a VHD, an ISO, or whatever..  In all my reading nobody had any suggestions to address the issues I was having.  All of my drivers were signed stock MS drivers that were native to the hardware.  I tried one BIOS tweak after another with no luck.  Finally, I hit the clear CMOS switch and re-installed the base OS fresh.  I can’t understand how, but once that was done, I was able to move stuff around without the damn thing freezing on me anymore.  (Mind you, I was running VMWare on that same box with no problems prior and made no BIOS tweaks whatsoever – so I can’t figure out why it two installs to get Hyper-V stable).

I thought all was well, that’s when the BSODs struck.  A quick search on the stop error I had in my event logs turned up an unofficial fix for the error.  It was a typical case of the blame game with Microsoft saying “It’s an Intel bug” followed by a procedure to get a Microsoft “Fix” to Intel’s bug…  Go figure.

The good news – After that last hot-fix, it’s stable and running my PBX happily in a VM.

What impressed me with Hyper-V:

iSCSI SAN connectivity – While there are caveats, it’s pretty much the same as adding a data-store in VMWare.  You connect the LUN to the OS with the MS iSCSI target then associate that physical disk the the VM.  The catch is to make sure the volume is offline on the host.  It’s extremely simple.

VHDs – As a Microsoft guy (most of the time), I must say I’m impressed with the flexibility of the latest virtual disk format MS offers.  There’s a nice free standalone utility at sysinternals that will even convert a live windows install to a VHD.  This allows for easy import and virtualization.  For as long as VMWare’s been around, I haven’t found nearly as much good stuff on managing VMDK files.

Performance – While my test Hyper-V system is fundamentally different in physical architecture from my VMWare powerhouse, I didn’t see any signs of bottlenecks.  Since I know they’re different systems, a speed comparison would be very unfair so I looked for anything I could perceive as a significant hiccup with no luck.  It’s a solid contender for performance reliability.

Value – Ok, for production environments, my review is useless as prices and licensing is very different, but for the tech enthusiast/IT experimentee crowd, you get EVERYTHING Hyper-V has to offer with a Technet Plus subscription ($250-$350/yr).  To get the VMWare equivalent, you have to pay full price for it no matter what (Tens of thousands of dollars for all features). 

VMWare still has some stronger points:

- VMWare allows more settings changes to a running host then Hyper-V does.  For example you can’t add a hard drive to a running VM in Hyper-V.

- What I found great about the iSCSI san connectivity was that I could attach both my VMWare install and Hyper-V install to the same iSCSI target and move the machine between two completely different hosts.  In fact, I’ll probably write a follow up post with more details on that later as there’s plenty of good that can come from that flexibility.  I suppose this could be a point for either, but I’m awarding it to VMWare (You can call it unprofessional favoritism if you want – or you can show some independent thought of your own and come to your own conclusion – Or both, I really don’t care as long as you don’t nag me about it).

- VMWare’s introductory product still has a better price for companies then Hyper-V (free).  Hyper-V Core is also free, but in terms of manageability it doesn’t compare.  I mean, using a completely command line driven windows interface is just plain unnatural.  Some would argue that both require a separate system to graphically manage them, but with VMWare that could be any system (even linux) - Hyper-V is limited to Vista and above.

- VMWare has an option to have the host create a VMDK abstract of even an iSCSI disk.  This means that at the cost of a little overhead (not perceivable in my tests), you can create snapshots and even clone disks at the host level.  You can’t do this with iSCSI targets in Hyper-V.  Snapshots are disabled with iSCSI targets.

In conclusion:

I’m still a VMWare guy by default.  I think the only thing I’m holding out for is the memory management though.  MS and VMWare seem to be constantly arguing over semantics and terms in this area (Over-commit vs Dynamic Memory allocation or whatever.. crap like that).  It simply boils down to how you manage the memory on your host.  I believe VMWare does a better job.  All the other features between the two are just different ways of doing essentially the same things.

I will admit, my dive into Hyper-V and VHDs introduced me to a new, faster, and easier way of backing up my windows VMs that I’m testing out, but that’s something for yet another topic.  I’ll just leave this as a teaser.

In all my searching, I haven’t found instructions or an example of how to monitor a windows service with spaces in the name through OpsView anywhere.  I’ve come close, but the example I found reports a green status whether the service is up or not.  I can’t remember where I found that, but if you’ve searched like me, you’ve probably found it too.   Anyway, below is a standard format in opsview for a standard windows service (I’ll use a Citrix PS service as an example here):

check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c nsc_checkservicestate -a ‘ShowAll IMAAdvanceSrv=started’

However, what if I wanted to monitor the Citrix SMA service?  The service name has spaces in it.  No problem!  Here you go:

check_nrpe -H $HOSTADDRESS$ -c nsc_checkservicestate -a ‘ShowAll “Citrix SMA Service’=started\\”

Yes it’s odd..  note the single and double quotes are intentionally inconsistent.  The combination of double escape sequences and odd single/double quoting is what does it though.  If you want OpsView to monitor a service with spaces in it, you need to replace “Citrix SMA Service” in the line above with whatever service you intend to monitor.  This has been tested with OpsView 3.5.2. and I use it regularly to monitor dozens of services across dozens of servers.

For those of you seeing this on facebook, my website is at http://www.groundtactics.com

According to various posts, an upcoming update to Windows Server 2008 R2 will introduce a feature called “Dynamic Memory”. While technically different in implementation and behavior, this feature can be used to obtain the same results as VMWare’s “Memory Overcommit” feature with few differences if properly configured. It is a key point that is often overlooked by those debating on which is better. Granted – it seems this dynamic memory feature appears to support far less operating systems, but it’s still a step in the right direction if you only intend to load the latest and greatest Microsoft operating systems.

I built a small 1u quad core xeon monster with 12 gb of ram. I’ve been feeling that ESXi was my only way to push the number VMs that I need for my testing. While not as complete as VMWares solution, if MS were to add a contender to VMWare’s “transparent page sharing”, It’d be enough for me to switch. Lets see what the future brings.

A side note: Maybe I’ll just go experiment with Hyper-V anyway. I want to check out RemoteFX when it’s out. With my technet plus subscription I’m already entitled to play with all that stuff.. I don’t have that luxury with VMWare so I’d have to pay for VMWare view if I wanted to see PCoIP in action.

Time will tell.

My VMWare Request Tracker 3.8.7 Virtual appliance is back. This one has it all and is designed to be usable even for people with no linux knowledge. Here are some features:

• RTFM installed
• Easy to modify script for checking pop3/imap accounts (Works with Exchange 2003/2007 too!)
• No bug with network interface disappearing when copying it to another VMWare instance.
• Webmin interface installed (No linux knowledge needed)
• All features working (Graphing/Shredder to name a couple)
• And some other stuff but I can’t remember at the moment.

Here’s the product:

RT3.8.7_RTFM2.4.2.RAR

And here’s the documentation (first draft – could have some errors):

Groundtactics RT3 appliance documentation

Poke around and enjoy!

It’s such a pain in the ass because I have a dozen other things to do but I’m stuck on this.

Maybe I’ll take a break from it and get back to re-posting my virtual appliances.