Windows Home Server 2 (Vail)

prescott28

prescott28

prescott28

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It's a while since anyone posted about this so I wondered if anyone was going to be using Vail when it comes out. The lack of Drive Extender (DE) seemed to be a major reason to look elsewhere.

I have rather given up on vail and am running Amahi on top of Fedora 14. Amahi has another version of DE, Greyhole, and so far performs very well. The only downside is that Windows 7 cannot back up to it and backups cannot be initiated from the server. That means installing another backup program on the client machines, I am, using GFI backup, but once ste up there is nothing else to do. An added benefit is that I will not have to shell out for WHSwhich I expect to cost around £100.
 
I can't see me upgrading because I would need DE however if I didn't I expect I would the features it has are pretty good to be honest.
 
i have the RC installed and everything is rock solid and still completely feature packed.....except for DE

the media streaming on the remote access page is really good.

however i will only buy the release if either DE is redeveloped or a 3rd party alternative is developed.
 
however i will only buy the release if either DE is redeveloped or a 3rd party alternative is developed.
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I know what you mean about DE. A reply I saw on the RC web page suggested Microsoft might consider it in a service pack later but that might mean the problems of another backup of the server and a re-install - yuk! My Linux version has disk pooling though not the convenient web access but I think I'll stay with it and not with WHS if, and until, it has DE.
 
Hikari Kisugi said:
It would be such a lovely OS if they could be arsed to included the one feature everyone wants.
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Yes but we can't have things we want, otherwise where would we be? Productive? Happy? Is that what you want?

I think the actual reason was that small businesses were using WHS instead of their SBS solution, which didn't have drive extender. There's still no technical reason Microsoft can't do it, even at this late stage.
 
What is it about the Drive Extender that makes it so sorely missed?

I'm just ploughing through all the OS options now, and I can't see what the fuss is about, or I can't see what I can't reasonably easily achieve using other simple methods?

I'm not knocking it, I just am not quite understanding the importance of it perhaps?

e.g. If I create 2 spanned volumes, one for live use, the other for backup, I can still expand the volumes easily by adding disks, and just backing up using some sync method whilst idle at night or more often, so it'd all be automated after it's setup?
 
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The ability to just plug a drive in, of any size and have it run in a software raid mode with little more than Add Drive to Pool. Folder level duplication spanning many drives without needing or knowing anything about raid levels. Without this, you might as well just use XP with a VNC client.
 
Well the benefits are DE are principally the ease of use. The use of pooled drives means that there is never a need to move system folders about if they get too full. For example if my son moves a lot of music onto the server music folder, I might have to move the folder to a different drive to make space. With DE all the disks are just a pool of storage and space only runs out when all the disks are full.

The whole thing can be managed in Linux, Fedora 14, by the addition of a suite called Amahi which uses Greyhole to mimic DE. Do you know any simple way by which this can be achieved in Windows with WHS as the prime candidate? If so, how?
 
PhillyDee said:
The ability to just plug a drive in, of any size and have it run in a software raid mode with little more than Add Drive to Pool. Folder level duplication spanning many drives without needing or knowing anything about raid levels.
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Not to mention being able to pull 'failed' drives out of the server, plug them into any desktop capable of reading NTFS and attempt to recover it.
The DriveExtender V2 didn't have this functionality and worse for it.
 
I see it can be quite useful!..

I would say that I the idea of using the Windows Dynamic Disk 'spanned' volume combined with using a periodic 'sync' backup to another spanned volume gets you most of the way to something as flexible and easy to use..

It gives you the ability to easily and instantly add more storage capacity, as you just pop in a disk, then go to the existing volume, click expand, and add the new disk to it, and windows just adds it in seconds.. (Of course if you are going for 100% backup, you'd need to also add a disk to the backup volume should it need it)..
You could use SyncToy at the very least to do a complete 100% sync between the volumes, your data loss is then limited to the last sync.


I know it's not identical, but it may suit some people to give them the 'easy to expand' and backup duplication on seperate disks with almost as little effort involved, and being regular 'volumes' in windows, it should integrate with all the normal tools with no issues.
 
I don't know how easy this would be to do but I expect that many Windows 7 users are using the 'Home Premium' version which does not support Dynamic Disks. This is certainly how our home machines are configured.

Really, though, WHS ought to have been about simplicity - drop in disks and done, and I think the version was more of less that. Its sad that version 2 will need some knowledge to make it work well.
 
I've just had a look at that, it looks like you need to install something on the client OS, one of the things I liked about WHS was that you only needed access to a web browser.

It says it's coming to ubuntu soon, so when it does I shall have a go :)
 
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