Windows Home Server Questions?

WHS technically doesn't support RAID arrays anyway, just stand alone drives.
Touch wood I've never lost any data, had a few failing drives but nothing totally dead.... yet.

k.jacko, Think your getting mixed up. sportq has it on a VM and HighlandeR is asking about hdd spin down :D
 
Last edited:
sportq said:
Is there any way to turn this off? My WHS is a VM with the underlying storage on a ZFS mirror. If WHS starts duplicating files, because it assumes it's sitting on unreliable drives, then I'm going to end up with four copies of everything.

I realise this isn't a common scenario but a virtual WHS is a great fit for my requirements (removes the need for another planet warmer).

-Pete
Click to expand...

I'd be really interested in your setup, SportQ :)

I've been following this thread with interest, but looking for something a bit more than just a WHS File Server (something that could handle HTPC duties as well). I was thinking of a decent little quad machine, that runs several VMs from a bare metal package such as ESXi. With a low power Quad and thre Eco Green drives in Raid5, I was kind of wondering if I could have my cake and eat it :D
 
hi guys im new at the server thing .. bt i have a old p3 sitting round doing nothing .... im after a set up, like u wud get if u rent web hosting online ........ to be able to test scripts, so basicly iis with php and database and cron jobs and the rest ...same as the hosted website panel wud offer .... i have server 2008, bt i can use any os really ... is there any software i can get to install all this in 1 as i failed at installing them by there self :P
 
Mantaray said:
hi guys im new at the server thing .. bt i have a old p3 sitting round doing nothing .... im after a set up, like u wud get if u rent web hosting online ........ to be able to test scripts, so basicly iis with php and database and cron jobs and the rest ...same as the hosted website panel wud offer .... i have server 2008, bt i can use any os really ... is there any software i can get to install all this in 1 as i failed at installing them by there self :P
Click to expand...

Google WAMP, self contained installer for Apache, PHP and MySQL for the Windows platform.
 
k.Jacko said:
Philly are/was you using a raid controller card with WHS or plain ole windows. IIRC WHS doesn't like any kind of hardware raid controller, totally favouring its own way (JBOD with data duplication) and kicking up a fuss whilst its at it.
That said, are we wandering off topic slightly, lol? ;)

[/SIZE]
Click to expand...

Not really, still WHS . . . . :D

No raid, just single drives, thats the only way my card lets you configure single drives! That said, ive just picked up an 8 port Adaptec SAS/SATA card for £38.
 
Arthalen said:
I'd be really interested in your setup, SportQ :)

I've been following this thread with interest, but looking for something a bit more than just a WHS File Server (something that could handle HTPC duties as well). I was thinking of a decent little quad machine, that runs several VMs from a bare metal package such as ESXi. With a low power Quad and thre Eco Green drives in Raid5, I was kind of wondering if I could have my cake and eat it :D
Click to expand...

The hardware is a pair of HP Proliant ML115G5's, a gigabit switch and an APC UPS. One is dual core (DC) and one quad core QC. The DC runs Solaris 10 with 4x1Tb drives configured as two ZFS mirrored pools and 8Gb of RAM. It runs VirtualBox with a number of VM's (XP MCE, WHS, Ubuntu and FC11). The ZFS filesystem underneath is snapshotted daily,weekly and monthly with the 30 daily and 4 weekly snapshots retained, monthlys are never automatically deleted (I clean them up from time to time though). This way I can get back anything that's been accidentally deleted by the family (or broken by me :) ) as long as it was present at the time of a snapshot. It's pretty busy as a Postfix mailserver, NFS and SMB server, transparent web proxy (with dansguardian) and VPN server.

A ZFS filesystem also exports an iSCSI block device that my Macbook Pro formatted with HFS+ and uses wirelessly as a Time Machine backup device.

The QC box has 4Gb of RAM and USB ESXi key (no disks). It's VM's are also stored on an NFS (ZFS) share on the DC system. It's mainly for testing and playing, the DC with the VirtualBox VM's are on 24x7.

-Pete
 
Last edited:
Arthalen said:
I'd be really interested in your setup, SportQ :)

I've been following this thread with interest, but looking for something a bit more than just a WHS File Server (something that could handle HTPC duties as well). I was thinking of a decent little quad machine, that runs several VMs from a bare metal package such as ESXi. With a low power Quad and thre Eco Green drives in Raid5, I was kind of wondering if I could have my cake and eat it :D
Click to expand...
No reason a decent spec machine running WHS couldn't do this to be honest (I know its designed to run headless).

You just map the network drives to the shares; and then connect to them that way.
 
Potentially, yes.

What I am led to believe though that the Media Center OS can't be virtualised though, as I cannot get a virtual 'pass through' for Video, Sound or TV Card hardware.

Which leaves me in the position of using a Premium or Ultimate Windows OS as a Host OS and for Media center duties, and then mount the server virtually with something like VirtualBox, Virtual Server or VMWare Server.

I know Virtual Server supports RDP to the Virtual sessions and is web based front end for management, so could in theory use this to manage and operate Virtual Servers while the Media Center OS is doing its thing.

I was liking the bare metal Hypervisor idea, but I can't find any documentation to support this setup so far.
 
Has anyone heard of any software/server or hardware that could run hdds only when required on a server/pc ?

I am just worried having say 10+ hdds constantly running is going to increase cost with electricity and wear and tear, ie I may not need to access those hdds, but only one drive for downloads constantly making all the other hdds not doing much. Would be ideal to switch them on or off or have them goto standbye using 1-2w on standbye.

Is there such a thing ?
 
k.Jacko said:
lol....yeah.....not a cheap way though eh? :)
Click to expand...

Lol nope - found another two ways but not to my liking really.

Theres a pair of plugins available for Media Center:

http://www.milliesoft.co.uk/index.p...e&id=9:iplayer-mce&catid=1:software&Itemid=11TunerFree MCE from Milliesoft.co.uk
TVCatchup.co.uk

Both are free and basically replicate the BBC/ITV/Channel4/Channel5 iPlayer webpages into Media center, allowing you to stream live TV from tinternet. As with iPlayer, its all Flash player based so in a frame on webpage it looks good, stretched to my monitors resolution of 1440x900 it doesn't look so great.

Still prefer to just use my RF Ariel, which gets Digital Freeview reception without a problem... just how the hell do I stream that signal over Ethernet to a VM?????
 
k.Jacko said:
have you tried sage tv or even mediaportal server (rather than client)?
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestions, but however...

MediaPortal Server still requires a TV Card to get a TV Signal from. that rules this one out.

The Sage TV Box comes closes but is pretty much like the Slingbox for how it works - proprietry software and needs some kind of input from a set top box.

At this rate, I'd be better off with a freeview bow I think, but I'm still researching for a way to do this.
 
I would assume because there is no reason to be 64-bit. Its not designed to be tampered with (i.e. playing with the desktop etc). It can be done, but then its oh so easy to break it. No need to have more than 2gb ram etc.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom