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

MikeB said:
the drive pooling in WIndows 8, the fact i can make it a htpc easily etc etc, oh and most importantly, it's new and shiney :D
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I had drive pooling in WHS v1 but haven't really missed it moving to WHS 2011. I'm running Windows 7 Media Center (sic) on my htpc clients with Media Browser so I just add the various drive letters I need and they show all of my films etc as I want.

My WHS2011 is setup with a quad tuner DVB-S2 card so I use that to deliver 2 x Sky HD tuners and 2 x Freesat tuners that any of my HTPC devices can access. For now Windows 8 will be a consideration for the front end solutions (although media center isn't going to change) but not for the back end.
 
I need and love pooling makes things so much easier. One of the reason's why I am still on WHS V1

It just works.

The windows 8 pooling looks fantastic and even includes parity not just mirroring very interesting. I have no issue with my server being a windows 8 machine.

I just want to acess my 12TB from any PC in the house and stream to my Rapberry pi's and XBMC machines

Storage-Spaces-Parity-and-a-Two-way-Mirror.png
 
RimBlock said:
Drive pooling looks sort of interesting but I will wait to see how that pans out.

Making my home server a HTPC is not what I would want from a server. Doing that would be making it a HTPC with shared storage surely.

Shiney, shiney, new toy to play with..... ok fair point but not as a replacement for my WHS 2011.

I would imagine WHS 2011 will stay with me for a while yet. Server 2012 Essentials is too much (both power and financially) for a home server for my requirements. Windows 8 I will wait to see if MS are still following the love-it/Lemon cycle before commiting. Win7 does me for home and I have no wish to have Metro in my life.

RB
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Why would you have to make your windows 8 machine a HTPC?:confused:

You could create a pool create folders and share them over the network just like in WHS v1 but this time not only duplication but with parity
 
Marvt74 said:
One question which might be fairly obvious. If i'm on another computer (not on my home network)
I can log into my server remotely and it shows like this, where i can access my files/make changes etc.

xamYl.jpg


However is there anyway i can effectively remote access onto the server (as i would from home) so i can access programs running on it? I'm sure there will be but i've never really done anything like this before.

EDIT: Not a clue what that picture is of as the folder image, certainly not of anyone i know!

EDIT2: The other thing thats odd is it only shows about 800 songs whereas i have many thousand. Any idea how it reads this?
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Go to logmein.com and set up an account. On your WHS machine go to the logmein.com website and log in with those account details. Add you WHS server (which should download logmein.msi to your machine and install it). The LogMeIn free is plenty enough for most people

Now from any other machine you should be able to remote control the WHS 2011 server as if you were sat at it through logmein.com
 
easyrider said:
I need and love pooling makes things so much easier. One of the reason's why I am still on WHS V1

It just works.

The windows 8 pooling looks fantastic and even includes parity not just mirroring very interesting. I have no issue with my server being a windows 8 machine.

I just want to acess my 12TB from any PC in the house and stream to my Rapberry pi's and XBMC machines

Storage-Spaces-Parity-and-a-Two-way-Mirror.png
Click to expand...

Not convinced with pooling. The performance, at least with parity seems very slow.

Also, it's not mentioned much, but if you go for simple pooling (non parity or duplication) then it stripes data into 256MB chunks across all drives in the pool. Effectively makes your whole pool a RAID0. So one drive fails, the whole pool goes. This is why I didn't like the Vail (WHS2011) version of Drive Extender...just no need to stripe data on a simple pool.

I'm having problems with a HBA that keeps dropping a drive, think it's Win8/2012 drivers that are needed, but more worryingly when a drive drops I've seen various things happening from BSODs to do with the storage space driver and also losing the whole storage space (even with parity on).

Given how close we are to RTM (in fact it's probably gone gold now), I just don't think that Storage Spaces are reliable enough just yet for primetime.
 
MikeB said:
the drive pooling in WIndows 8, the fact i can make it a htpc easily etc etc, oh and most importantly, it's new and shiney :D
Click to expand...

RimBlock said:
Making my home server a HTPC is not what I would want from a server.
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easyrider said:
Why would you have to make your windows 8 machine a HTPC?:confused:
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I have highlighted the part I was replying to in MikeBs post prior to my reply. My response was saying the same as yours to Mikes comment.

RB
 
Just going to install WHS 2011 tonight. Will be migrating from WHS.

I know Windos 8 is just around the corner but think I'll prefer to wait and see how well it performs first.

Just wondering what storage pooling / raid software you guys been using ?

Tempted to go for Stablebit Drive Pool
 
Snow-Munki said:
so if you loose a HDD you loose your data ?

and what if a shared files take up more space than one physical disk ?
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I use the inbuilt backup to backup twice a day to various backup drives in the server and to provide an alternative location backup I'm using crashplan to a NAS drive.

My movie library is 3GB so I've just got the files split over 2 shared folders Movies 1 and Moves 2 which when I access Media Browser on my HTPC returns both locations as a single source.

I thought I would miss drive pooling but it's not been an issue in all honesty
 
ah makes sense ... i think.

Will have a play around with the builtin backup solution. Never used it before on WHS.

and that's true, I use plex but similar situation. I can just add more search folders.
 
If MS couldn't get the pooling right (still issues with silent errors and data loss in WHS 1) then it doesn't instill me with confidence a third party package that can't have more than a few thousand users won't have some hidden surprises.

Anyway when they dropped DE from Vail, and before any 3rd party stuff, I'd made the decision and gone with hardware RAID - so don't need software pooling now.
 
Any one got any ideas with this?

I've recently done some updates and when I rebooted te server it wasn't accessible. Plugged it into a monitor and it seems it's only booting into System Recovery mode with the options to do some diagnostics but no option to just load WHS as normal.

I can't seem to get past this anyone got any ideas other than doing a clean re-install which I dot really want to? I'd been having some back up issues recently so don't know when the last backup was achieved.
 
I currently have WHS2011 and am seriously considering windows 8 as a replacement due to the drive pooling feature.....now I hear windows 8 pro can host virtual machines so here's a thought.....can I install windows 8 and use it to host my existing WHS2011 as a virtual machine, and also connect the virtual machine into a windows 8 drive pool for easy grow storage?

If it can do it then for me it would give the best of both worlds ie expandable and fault resilient storage combined with remote access.

Would be interested on your thoughts on if this is possible.
Thanks,
Stew
 
It's possible - I do something similar but not using Win 8 and using a RAID on the host OS to pass through the disks to the VM WHS2011.

I've tried Storage Spaces too, but I'm not convinced it's that robust. Had major problems when drives timed out and basically blew away the Storage Space and the OS!

You also realise that if you're creating non-duplicated/parity pools that data is striped, one disk goes the lot goes.
 
easyrider said:
No

But there is no point in buying it. Its getting ditched in favour of WHS 2012 or if you are smart a windows 8 based machine

http://www.wegotserved.com/2012/07/03/building-windows-8-home-server-introduction/
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Disagree. If you don't need/want Storage Spaces it's much easier to control user access and shares, and there's also centralised backup, Remote Web Access and streaming with WHS.

Yes it can all be done on Windows 8, but not as easily. That article is terrible as well (not aiming this at Easyrider :) ). When all said and done it talks about how to create users, shares and homegroups, but where is the advice on centralised backup alternatives, streaming, remote access? It spends most of it's time talking about a generic PC build and Windows 8. I was really disappointed...

I'm trialling WSE2012 right now, and in the main it's WHS2011 with Storage Spaces - so simplifies much of the missing "features" you'd have to work around in a Win8 build - obviously the $400 cost is going to be prohibitive to many.
 
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