***The Official Windows Home Server 2011 Thread***

[wonder_lander]

My WHS 2011 is sitting on a shelf waiting for the DE replacements to be released. Until then I'm happy with my current WHS v1.

Not looking forward to the prospect of migrating to a new server! May build a new server and sell the old ML115 that I currently use.

 

[Jed Shields]

I've got v1 and am thinking about changing to v2:

A) Does anyone have any experience with something like Drive Bender? How does it compare to the original DE?

B) How do I span a folder over different HDDs? I have over 3Tb in HD movies, for example. Do I just map different drive letters and the same folder name ie J:\ServerMoviesHD and K:\ServerMoviesHD and point XBMC at both drives?

 

[PR.]

I didn't go with any kind of drive pool programs purely because after months of extensive testing MS still managed to get a data loss bug creep in to the original drive extender functionality, what's the chances of a similar bug creeping in to a lesser used 3rd party version.

In the end I went with RAID5 to get a decent sized pool of space, and as the WHS backup is useless I use SyncToy to duplicate the data to a USB drive that I keep away from the machine. It's not perfect but I'm satisfied I'm taking enough precautions to keep the data safe.

 

[Jed Shields]

TBH, I don't use the folder backup on v1 DE, I've got backup on HDDs on a number of different PCs, using SyncToy. It's the drive naming / folder naming that I'm unsure about.

 

[RimBlock]

Must have missed a 'new post' notification on this thread

I have bad times with Raid in the past and is it easy to exapnd the array without removing data and copying it back?

I believe it is fairly easy to expand a spanned drive but would have to check to be sure.

Sounds like an option but its not DE and duplication!

Yep, it is a solution that will give you a large pool of space with a 1-for-1 backup set. Both the original and the backup set will be accessible to you at any time.

Thanks. Rolling back after a deletion is not an issue

So if all you need is a mirror copy of your files and a big area to save them on then the 2 spanned sets with nightly robocopy would seem to be a good option. No need to worry about other company updates killing your array, MS Software raid is pretty stable and I have been using it since Win2000 at various time without any software related issues.

I have just updated some my SAS controllers (2x1068i -> 2x9211i) and after swapping cables around, sharing drives between the two controllers (not matching the spread of drives over the old controllers) I booted ESXi 5, passed the controllers through to the WHS vm and the arrays were just 'there' and fully usable as usual. There was also no issue with upgrading from ESXi 4.1 to 5.0. Drive failure is the most likely reason to loose a Windows software array and you would need to loose 2 drives in order to loose everything (same as raid 1,1+0, 0+1, 5 etc).

Bit more manual intervention in setting up and if something goes wrong though than DE.

RB

 

[Jed Shields]

Is there a downloadable trial version of WHS 2011? My WHS v1 has just died and this is the ideal time to test the new version rather than just re-install the old.

 

[RimBlock]

Is there a downloadable trial version of WHS 2011? My WHS v1 has just died and this is the ideal time to test the new version rather than just re-install the old.

Nope, MS have made available a demo server you can try out but not an ISO you can download and install on your own hardware.

There are MSDN versions floating around the net but these will expire. I grabbed a MSDN version, tried it on my hardware (which can cause OS issues), it worked with my config and I liked it so bought the retail version. When activation was prompted I just put the serial number of the retail version in and all is well. If I reinstall I just use the retail disk.

RB

 

[platypus]

Am getting slowly tempted to migrate . Mainly just for the 64bit platform and more memory, and I think I can justify an i3/5 upgrade if I do it for the server, rather than just a htpc.

Would people recommend setting up a raid before installing WHS? It's so irritating about de, as I really cant be bothered to play about with raid, but meh.

Does it still have those annoying built in default shares?

 

[RimBlock]

Am getting slowly tempted to migrate . Mainly just for the 64bit platform and more memory, and I think I can justify an i3/5 upgrade if I do it for the server, rather than just a htpc.

Would people recommend setting up a raid before installing WHS? It's so irritating about de, as I really cant be bothered to play about with raid, but meh.

Does it still have those annoying built in default shares?

.

WHS will allow 8GB ram which is better but not as good as it could have been. If you upgrade to an i3 then you could be seeing savings on electricity depending on what you are running now and if you choose an i5 (non-K versions like the 2400/2500) then you could use the box as an VMWare ESXi virtualization server and run multiple virtual machines on it so being able to use all the machines resources with VM installs that are best suited for the task. Get a z68 based board and you will get VT-d compatibility which will allow you to pass devices to your VM for the VM to exclusively control (i.e. SATA controller for disks you hve your shared data on for your WHS 2011 VM). The VT instruction sets are disabled on the 'K' variations of the i5/i7 though. Just another option to play around with.

As for raid, depends on what you have and what you want to get out of it. The boot drive really doesn't need it for home server unless you want redundancy. If you want your boot drive raided then you need to do so before installing. For your data drives, if you are just after one large pool of storage then use Windows to span the disks. Easy to do and once done you just leave it alone and it will work. The advantage of using Windows to do the data raid is that you can transfer it to any Windows machine. It also means you are not hardware bound. If your mainboard dies then you may have an issue finding another which will keep the integrity of the array and data. With Windows raid the hardware is transparent and you can move the data between different hardware platforms without loss as long as you have Windows installed (obviously a recent version like 7/2003/2008 etc). Spanning does not cause a hit to the processor but also has no redundancy so you need a backup. If you want to go raid 5 then get a reasonable card that will do it for you.

If you go the ESXi (or the MS version of virtual host) then to give an idea... I have a i5 2400 with 16GB ram. I have WH2011 (shares, DNS, DHCP), Linux CentOS Transmission, Linux CentOS Webserver, Linux CentOS MineCraft server all running and barely go over 4GB ram (2.5 dedicated to WHS 2011) and 3Ghz CPU (i5 have 4 x 3GHz cores). All the VMs are on very low load but it should give an idea. The other beauty is that you can start/stop VMs independently of each other so reboot one OS VM while the others are still running and snapshot them so you can more or less instantly revert if needed (space permitting).

Oh and yes, WHS2011 still insists on having "My Movies", "Pictures" etc default shares and complains if you remove them. I personally really hare the 'Recorded TV' one. I would much prefer just 'TV' but I guess the recorded was added to make it look like the the use was for legitimate recorded tv shows rather than DVD rips....

RB

 

[_SBradley_]

Hi guys,

Just discovered this thread after installing WHS 2011 on my HP MicroServer a couple of weeks ago.

I know you can't rename or delete the default shares (nasty design; I'd much prefer to start from a clean slate and build the shares myself!), but I have a related question regarding media streaming.

Is it possible to do media streaming from non-default shares? It seems not, but I may be missing something.

I have video from my camera in the default "Video" share and films in a custom "Films" share. I'd rather be able to stream the films than the home movies, but it seems I can only stream the home movies! Is there anything I can do?

Similarly, I barely use the default "Pictures" share; I prefer the name "Photos" for stuff that comes from my camera.

Thanks!
Simon

 

[platypus]

Is it possible to do media streaming from non-default shares? It seems not, but I may be missing something.

I have video from my camera in the default "Video" share and films in a custom "Films" share. I'd rather be able to stream the films than the home movies, but it seems I can only stream the home movies! Is there anything I can do?

Similarly, I barely use the default "Pictures" share; I prefer the name "Photos" for stuff that comes from my camera.

Thanks!
Simon

I haven't used v2011 but I can't see why it would be any different to v1 in this respect. What are you streaming too, and using what software?

I just mount my shares as network folders so I have M:\, S:\, V:\ in windows explorer.

 

[wonder_lander]

I've now migrated from WHS v1 to WHS 2011. Migration went well, I just bought a new 2TB drive then started to move data onto it before removing more and more drives from the pool until the data was all sat on server backup drives.

What add-ins are people using with WHS 2011?

 

[tbz_ck]

Aweico do a good Wake on Lan one. Also Advanced Admin Console

 

[platypus]

I've now migrated from WHS v1 to WHS 2011. Migration went well, I just bought a new 2TB drive then started to move data onto it before removing more and more drives from the pool until the data was all sat on server backup drives.

What add-ins are people using with WHS 2011?

Can you write a bit more about your experience please? Problems you encountered? How you're finding setting up the shares without DE?

 

[wonder_lander]

I found the whole experience very simple to be honest. The reason for the upgrade is that I'm going to be installing a quad tuner HD satellite card into the server and thought I may as well do it on WHS 2011.

I had approx 1.7TB of data with about 2TB free. Disk config was 500GB system drive, 1TB drive, and 2 x 2TB drives. I decided to get a further 2TB so I could have some redundancy in the migration.


I added the new 2TB drive as a server backup drive and copied all my data onto it.
I then removed another existing 2TB drive from the drive pool and copied the data to that as well. This mean't I had 2 drives out of the pool with all my data on it.

Finally I removed my now empty 1TB and 2TB drives from the pool so all I had left was my 500GB disk with WHS v1 and old PC backups on it. This has been stored incase I need to use it again.

Next up I used the 1TB drive as my new system drive and installed WHS 2011
I then connected up my 3 x 2TB drives (2 full with data and one empty).

Using the inbult shares in WHS I changed the location of videos to one of my drives with data on and then moved the contents of my videos folder that I backed up into the new share. I then configured a twice daily backup of videos to the blank 2TB to give me duplication.

I then configured the remaining WHS shares to the other data drive and moved the data into their appropriate shares, again configuring where appropriate the twice daily backup.

I do miss DE and am making do without it. I can see me having some fun and games managing backups which I didn't have to worry about before. I am still concerned about the thrid party DE replacements with regards to data integrity and performance so will look again at them in a few months time.

Here are a couple of pics of my HD and share setup.

C/D drives are the 1TB drive used for the installation
F is the 2TB drive I'm using for the videos share
G is the second 2TB drive I'm using for photos, music and other shares.

 

[platypus]

Looks ok. Trouble is one of my partitions is over the 2TB non-GPT limit that v2011 has, so would have to split shares, and I've have to get a few 2TB disks to back up data...grrr.

 

[platypus]

Getting towards possible upgrade time, anyone think this is a decent spec for a server? Or would I see a performance drop, going from a Core2 Quad Q8400? I would get a different case, and I'd be sticking in an SSD (server doubles as my XBMC box), and probably 8GB of ram as I have it lying around.

 

[ChileanLlama]

Why are you looking to upgrade? Purely from a WHS2011 (not XBMC) perspective I can't see much difference really, neither CPU will be pushed for day to day use. Most taxing thing is usually if you're re-encoding on the fly for streaming media.

 

[platypus]

The hardware I'm replacing is getting long in the tooth. I suppose the old adage 'if it aint broke' can be applied. Aye I realise WHS itself doesn't use much in the way of resources, streaming bluray/full hd stuff does.

 

[ChileanLlama]

If it ain't broke then it must be time for an upgrade

I had an E5200 for BD playback and that was great, most of the work done by the GPU. I've also got a Q8400 in a server. Only running W2K8R2 as host with WHS2011 as guest VM. 2 cores and 4GB RAM allocated, and it performs well, though I'm not encoding any streams.

If it was me, I wouldn't want to drop to a dual core from a quad, so I'd be tempted to throw an i5 at it just to be safe.