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LAN Party Forums => General Discussion => Started by: The Nstuff on November 23, 2010, 06:35:53 PM
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Cypher just pointed me to the horrible news:
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/windowshomeserver/archive/2010/11/23/windows-home-server-code-name-vail-update.aspx (http://windowsteamblog.com/windows/b/windowshomeserver/archive/2010/11/23/windows-home-server-code-name-vail-update.aspx)
For everyone who uses and loves WHS, i would suggest you post a comment and tell them that the decision to drop the drive extender feature is a huge mistake.
And for those that don't know, WHS is an awesome MS server product. Version 1 is based on Windows 2003 server. On top it adds a robust backup feature of all windows pcs on your network. It comes with a free <yourname>.homeserver.com domain that points to your home server and allows you to access files you've shared and upload new ones, you can rdp to any computer on your network that you have setup to do so. And the key feature is you can add a ton of hard drives you have laying around (80GB, 100GB, 500GB) all to the server and it will treat them all as a single contiguous drive. You can then right-click on a folder and make WHS duplicate the contents on two physical drives. Basically a robust software-raid solution with the best elements of both 0 and 1. Version 2 "Vail" is based on Windows 2008 R2 and although they are upgrading certain key features, the fact that they are dropping the Drive Extender feature is a huge blow.
Really good write-up of the feature and MS' decision to remove it:
http://www.wegotserved.com/2010/11/23/microsoft-abandons-development-windows-home-server-drive-extender/ (http://www.wegotserved.com/2010/11/23/microsoft-abandons-development-windows-home-server-drive-extender/)
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I use server '03 with my HP home server. Love this little beast. So what's going on is that "Vail" (more like, BAIL... HA HA!) isn't going to allow you to hot-plug in a random drive and be able to dynamically add the spare 500gigger you have laying around to your storage pool? Do I have that right? All because spinning drives nowadays have so much damn space that there's *obviously* no need to continually add in more than....4-5 drives to a small home or business server?
Edit: Because we all know that modern day platter-based drives NEVER fail and you would NEVER need to replace or duplicate data really, really quickly.
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Bug report filed on Microsoft Connect for this. I LOL'd, then I voted it as important ;)
https://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/feedback/details/624029/add-drive-extender-back-to-vail?wa=wsignin1.0
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Bug report filed on Microsoft Connect for this. I LOL'd, then I voted it as important ;)
[url]https://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/feedback/details/624029/add-drive-extender-back-to-vail?wa=wsignin1.0[/url]
nice link, i logged in and voted it up too as well as commented. it's currently got 759 votes.
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Page not found
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Hmm, maybe I should check out WHS...
I'm currently a FreeNAS user.
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Page not found
Try again. I saw on another forum that the page for this wasn't coming up for awhile but later came back online. It came up for me just now.
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Weird, still not working for me. Bah.
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Noooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Another stab in the heart of WHS.
http://gizmodo.com/5703422/hp-says-goodbye-to-windows-home-server-market (http://gizmodo.com/5703422/hp-says-goodbye-to-windows-home-server-market)
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they should just turn the idea of WHS into a software package that can run on any Windows system (Win7, Win Server 2k3/8, etc). If i could run the software bits of WHS on a win7 box, then i could have Media Center with tv capabilities and all my media on the same box. That would be massively full of win.
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That's the best idea I've heard in a while. Someone give this man a medal.
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(http://farm1.static.flickr.com/105/315230345_5b7bc65c64.jpg)
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So you'd be backing up to....yourself? Sorry, that's a bag of fail. Nothing's stopping you from storing your media on a standard server/Win7 box now. How would this setup be something special enough to get me to part with my money for it, like WHS v1 did so easily because of how different(ly awesome) it was from other products?
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um, so the WHS server i have hooked up to my tv could instead be Windows 7 running the WHS software on top. I don't know of any server-specific feature MS relies on in WHS v1 that would mean that it couldn't run on win7. I could still load it up the pc with random hard drives for backups and file storage, but it would also have the features of win7 that MS won't let us have (media center for example for cablecard tv tuner functionality).
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Gotcha, I misunderstood your postulation. Carry on good sir.
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Question. Is drive extender just a way of managing drive pooling?
Forgive any lack of proper terms as I'm researching things as I type this up.
If MS really does get rid of DE in vail, I'm thinking I might go into more of a free route for my server "needs" once I outgrow my HP WHS. FreeNAS looks interesting (and there's 256megs of hidden usb flash on the EX47x I didn't know about that can host FreeNAS????), but I know next to nothing of it. Apparently it natively supports ZFS, which supports drive pooling? Am I right in that? I don't know. I came across this comment on a random board about it all.
"Derek said... @ May 15, 2010 10:11 AM
The drive pool is fixed in at least the latest (maybe earlier version too?) FreeNAS. FreeNAS now natively supports Sun's ZFS, so you can use that for media storage and add drives too the zPool as needed. I haven't used it yet, but I plan to do something similar to your previous article with the ZFS trick. I think the UPnP has come a long way since then too."
Can anyone educate me a bit on all this? I've got a spare dual-core machine that I could experiment on, but I don't have any spare drive(s) to plug into it and play with, thus negating my desire to do something new and neat.