WHS 2012

WSE2012 should come close to the plug-and-play simplicity of WHS v1. Storage spaces should be superior to WHS v1 DE - you can set up multiple pools, you can choose folders to have duplicated on more than two drives for extra safety, and it supports drives of different sizes. But you wont need WSE2012 to get it, Win8 will have it.

Win8 also has a file versioning system to allow quick recoveries, and you can store the version data on a separate machine, so some people are considering using Win8 alone as a replacement to WHS!
 
W8 or WSE2012 both lack the backup tool from WHSv1 though.

I know its possible with other software, but the joy of WHS is that you get everything working with 1 piece of software.
 
My understanding is that W8 has it's own network backup system, I remember reading WHS sites who were confused because it seemed to replace the WHS system (before MS killed WHS). You do the lose the centralised warnings though.
 
WSE2012 has the backup facility, and to be honest hasn't really changed significantly from WHSv1 - which has the advantage of not backing up the same files/clusters if they exist on multiple machines - this can save lots of disk space.

The easy ability to manage users/shares and backup are really where WHS/WSE make it much simpler to setup and forget about than using W8.

Just as an add to those still using WHSv1 - MS indicated during the Vail beta that they had identified occurrences of silent "bit rot" in the storage pool, which is why they changed the whole Drive Extender. I don't fully understand the circumstances, but given it would be difficult to detect if it was happening it is quite worrying if you have precious data. This was also another factor in my decision to move off WHSv1.
 
The bit rot problem they identified related to the version of driver extender they were developing with WHS2011, which was a different tool to the driver extender of WHSv1 (in the same way that the backup tool in 2011 is different - and inferior - to v1's).
The change to a 64 bit model, and harmonizing with SBS led to massive changes in the architecture, and they couldn't develop a version of driver extender in time that was reliable enough. But, it doesn't take a genius to recognise they continued working on that tool, and it became what is now Storage Spaces in W8 and WSE2012.

Skeeter said:
W8 or WSE2012 both lack the backup tool from WHSv1 though.
Click to expand...

WSE2012 does have an automated client backup tool, and it's superior to both v1 and 2011. I haven't found out if it supports UEFI/GPT clients, which 2011 fails (does v1 work with them?).
 
MeMeMeMe said:
The bit rot problem they identified related to the version of driver extender they were developing with WHS2011, which was a different tool to the driver extender of WHSv1 (in the same way that the backup tool in 2011 is different - and inferior - to v1's).
The change to a 64 bit model, and harmonizing with SBS led to massive changes in the architecture, and they couldn't develop a version of driver extender in time that was reliable enough. But, it doesn't take a genius to recognise they continued working on that tool, and it became what is now Storage Spaces in W8 and WSE2012.
Click to expand...

Nope you're mixing up two things there.

There were problems with WHS2011 (Vail) Drive Extender and in particular business applications (SQL etc) which meant it did not perform and was dropped.

However Microsoft stated there were problems in the way Drive Extender in WHSv1 was working, hence why they had changed the design of Drive Extender so much.

From an MS rep explaining the changes: "Since we have moved from a file based to block based approach, your concerns above are valid. The decision to change our approach did not come easily, in addition to the reasons Bulats mentioned in other threads (application compatibility issues, inability to duplicated files that are in use or to provide real time duplication), there were major architectural changes in the OS between Server 2003 (which was used by WHS v1) and Server 2008 R2 (which is used by Vail). These changes made it almost impossible to re-use the same file based approach for Drive Extender in Vail. Further when we took a look at the feedback, and the bug reports, we discovered that even after the V1 data corruption was fixed, silent hardware errors still caused several data integrity issues. The silent errors are especially common in commodity hard-drives that most of our customer base is using, and it was very important to us to have built in detection and correction of such errors. The only way we saw this possible was by changing to block level."

You can see the full thread at http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en/whsvailbeta/thread/32844aae-9f41-41cb-8a4a-f6c26ddfdd6f but the bottom line is/was a problem exists in DE on WHSv1 and it's never been fixed...
 
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