WHS v2 "Vail" leaks online

Can you do an upgrade install to easily migrate data from your old WHS? Also, is there any sort of redundancy taken into consideration in regards to the main OS drive?
 
Anyone have any info on what they added to WHS v1? Besides being based on Server 2008 R2.
 
Server 2008R2 is 64-bit only I believe, so that means we'll finally have a 64-bit WHS.

Hopefully they've added better support for backing up the OS drive, as dydx mentioned. Also, I hope they make the server recovery process more transparent. With the current WHS, if you do a server recovery, it doesn't always recognize your existing drive pool, and it doesn't give you much feedback as to what went wrong. Some tools to diagnose, or at least help you rebuild the pool would be nice.
 
I just want to be able to upgrade from current WHS build to the new one without a big hassle moving around 10TB of pooled storage. Also, I need to upgrade my motherboard as I went with a microatx board not thinking I was going to be using up all the slots with raid cards and stuff I was never expecting to put on the server( A security system, DVR card)...
 
Metaluna said:
Server 2008R2 is 64-bit only I believe, so that means we'll finally have a 64-bit WHS.

Hopefully they've added better support for backing up the OS drive, as dydx mentioned. Also, I hope they make the server recovery process more transparent. With the current WHS, if you do a server recovery, it doesn't always recognize your existing drive pool, and it doesn't give you much feedback as to what went wrong. Some tools to diagnose, or at least help you rebuild the pool would be nice.
Click to expand...

Interesting upgrade problem here. None of the published upgrades support going from x32 to x64. I guess we take the pool offline, cold load the OS, and then let it rebuild the pool from the tombstones? I know I'm jumping to conclusions here but this doesn't sound like a fun upgrade at all.
 
PigLover said:
Interesting upgrade problem here. None of the published upgrades support going from x32 to x64. I guess we take the pool offline, cold load the OS, and then let it rebuild the pool from the tombstones? I know I'm jumping to conclusions here but this doesn't sound like a fun upgrade at all.
Click to expand...

Doing an upgrade should not be a problem
The OS and the file system are compelety independent.

DE just uses symbolic Links which are the same on 32bit and 64 bit.
So when you do an upgrade it will just nuke the OS partition and install the new WHS, then they will have to recognize the FS symbolic links.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Doing an upgrade should not be a problem
The OS and the file system are compelety independent.

DE just uses symbolic Links which are the same on 32bit and 64 bit.
So when you do an upgrade it will just nuke the OS partition and install the new WHS, then they will have to recognize the FS symbolic links.
Click to expand...

OK, but the backup database? The backup's themselves? The user settings? All your add-ins will probably be incompatible due to x32->x64? There are a long list of hassles associated with MSs preferred OS crash recovery for WHS (start over and rebuild the tombstones...). The only thing they got right was recovering the DE filesystem - and that is slowwwww if you've got lots of disks with losts of data. Hope the delay getting Vail to release is the care they are taking getting all these other parts right (wanna buy a bridge?).
 
PigLover said:
OK, but the backup database? The backup's themselves? The user settings? All your add-ins will probably be incompatible due to x32->x64? There are a long list of hassles associated with MSs preferred OS crash recovery for WHS (start over and rebuild the tombstones...). The only thing they got right was recovering the DE filesystem. Hope the delay getting Vail to release is the care they are taking getting all these other parts right (wanna buy a bridge?).
Click to expand...

Microsoft is not responsible for 3rd party add-ins. Also 32bit software runs on 64bit machines, so there should be minimal issues.

Backups, user settings, etc.
Backups and its database can be moved when doing a system recovery on WHS currently, so i dont see why micorosft would not improve the process in the new version.

User settings? Yea ok it currently doesn do this, but there are plenty of VB scripts out there that you can run to back it all up and restore it.

Hopefully MS will figure this out.
 
Im downloading the CTP now and will install it tonight when i get home.
I will try to do an upgrade on my WHS 2003 and see what happens
 
It's scary, I'm excited for this software in a way I shouldn't be. nitrobass, good luck with the test.
 
nitrobass - when you get it built, could you check to see if the DE pool will support large (>2TB) drives. If it does, can you tell if they are using GPT or something proprietary?
 
PigLover said:
nitrobass - when you get it built, could you check to see if the DE pool will support large (>2TB) drives. If it does, can you tell if they are using GPT or something proprietary?
Click to expand...
there aren't any drives > 2TB
 
Exactly...

The next obvious thing somebody would post: why use raid and DE together.

Answer: performance. DE is currently limited by the read/write speed of single drives.

Next: but its all limited by network bandwidth.

Answer: true, but there are ways to deal with that in the short run (link bundling) and its not long before we see affordable 10Gbase-t hitting the streets.
 
The big question is whether WHS 2010 added any parity abilities to drive extender, or whether Microsoft answer to "redundancy" is still limited to simple file duplication/mirroring. If the latter, then the Apple iPad has serious competition from WHS 2010 as biggest fail of the year.
 
Last edited:
odditory said:
If you don't want hassles or risks to your 10Tb then maybe an early leaked beta isn't the best choice? Surprised how many people are chiming in with expectations already when it's not "a new version", its a pre-release beta. That's why the beta group signs an agreement not to complain if a bug blows up all their data.

That said, the big question is whether WHS v2 added parity ability to drive extender, or whether their "redundancy" solution is still limited to simple file duplication. If the latter, then see you in 2 years for WHS v3 to ask again whether MS pulled their heads out and WHS isn't a toy anymore.
Click to expand...

I am not planning on jumping on the beta wagon, just talking about the final build. As you mentioned though, I won't be jumping aboard unless it has some significant benefits, like you mentioned.
 
Another thought. Vail is built on top of Server 2008r2. Lots of people have reported builds of Server 2008r2 with Hyper-V who run WHS in a virtual because they like its automated backup features as well as some of the better add-ins. Vail may just make this configuration much easier - eliminating the need for the virtual.

Run Vail, with or without a DE pool at your option.
Outside of WHS, build your really large RAID array and publish it as a share.

Then you get all the good part of WHS, you can use DE with or without duplication for small storage, but you also get your large storage needs covered with Raid. And you don't need to mess around with running the separate WHS OS in a virtual.

Thoughts?
 
^ sounds like a good hybrid solution. Especially now that its built on Win2008R2 foundation which I'm a very big fan of, which means it won't take 2-3 hours to install it like the current WHS built on 2003 that makes you load a million drivers.

I just grabbed WHS 2010 build 7360 off Usenet, looks like it in fact requires a 64-bit CPU which is also a good sign.
 
I was just thinking the cheap iPAD + WHS would be a decent combo assuming I was too lazy to want to sit somewhere comfortable like my couch in front of the 47" 120hz screen and watch a movie. Oh wait...

Actually odditory, I was calculating my build's disk utilization (30 drives nothing like yours) and I'll basically be using 2/3 the raw space whereas WHS is 1/2. OK so that's 5 drives or say $500 worth of storage, but that's less than the cost of a raid controller. On the other hand, the setup is mostly raid 6 with a bit of raid 1 for OS disks + hotspares so it may have a bit more redundancy, and be a bit faster. Still, if you don't have a ton of drives the duplication is pretty cost effective because you have low port costs.

And on GPT... you can enable it on WHS v1.0, but it is somewhat scary to add an 8TB array for example.
 
Good point pjkenned except thanks to the miracle of SAS expansion, when you take an HP SAS Expander and combine it with a low-cost 4 or 8 port RAID6 card off ebay, you've got 32 ports of RAID6 for $400-$500.

I guess it all depends on the situation and who is managing the system. If it was a non-technical friend of mine then obviously I wouldn't suggest him to mess with raid cards and rather just buy extra drives.

The reason for my gripe about DE and lack of parity is simply because so many other things are doing it (Flexraid, unRAID, FreeNAS) and it's REALLY not that big a brain bender to implement. Microsoft needs to catch the F up.
 
odditory said:
Good point pjkenned except thanks to the miracle of SAS expansion, when you take an HP SAS Expander and combine it with a low-cost 4 or 8 port RAID6 card off ebay, you've got 32 ports of RAID6 for $400-$500.

I guess it all depends on the situation and who is managing the system. If it was a non-technical friend of mine then obviously I wouldn't suggest him to mess with raid cards and rather just buy extra drives.

The reason for my gripe about DE and lack of parity is simply because so many other things are doing it (Flexraid, unRAID, FreeNAS) and it's REALLY not that big a brain bender to implement. Microsoft needs to catch the F up.
Click to expand...

Yea i just jumped on the R6 + Expander Train.
But dont get too worked up guys, im still gonna run WHS.

I still run WHS in a Hyper-V VM like i do currently, but i will carve 2TB volumes and do passthrough to WHS.
This way I have redundancy on a hardware level, and for REALLY, REALLY important stuff i can use duplication and WHS Server backups to external device.

WHS in a Hyper-V VM is the only way to do it :)
 
Of course, MS will argue that one of the advantages of DE is that it does not use parity and stores everything as normal files. They will argue that you can take any drive out of a DE pool and take it to any system that supports NTFS, mount it and read off all the files. They will argue that you can take a partially corrupted DE pool from a fully corrupted WHS system (lost the system and parts of the pool) and still easily recover any file data from any drives that can still be read, making it much more resilient against failure than any implementation using parity. They will argue that for their target market the cost in extra disk drives is minimal compared to this benefit.

Not suggesting that I buy into this. Whether or not I or you agree with these things is not meaningful. The fact is that the product managers that deal with WHS believe these things with religious passion.

And because of that i'd bet a paycheck that you will never see official support for any form of parity within WHS or any other Microsoft product the DE finds its way into.
 
Last edited:
PigLover said:
Of course, MS will argue that one of the advantages of DE is that it does not use parity and stores everything as normal files. They will argue that you can take any drive out of a DE pool and take it to any system that supports NTFS, mount it and read off all the files. They will argue that you can take a partially corrupted DE pool from a fully corrupted WHS system (lost the system and parts of the pool) and still easily recover any file data from any drivers that can still be read, making it much more resilient against failure than any implementation using parity. The will argue that for their target market the cost in extra disk drives is minimal compared to this benefit.

Not suggesting that I buy into this. Whether or not I or you agree with these things is not meaningful. The fact is that the product managers that deal with WHS believe these things with religious passion.

And because of that i'd bet a paycheck that you will never see official support for any form of parity within WHS or any other Microsoft product the DE finds its way into.
Click to expand...

I can say from past experience this can be EXTREMELY useful.
I had a F up on my produciton WHS and was able to recover my data this way.
 
Yea I really like WHS in Hyper-V. Pretty excited about it actually as it has been working really well. I used Raid 6 and Raid 1 arrays on an Adaptec card on my old build so I'm used to the 2TB slices. The big thing is remembering which generic 2TB array aligns with which disks which aligns with which 2TB volume which aligns with which WHS disk. Once you have a system remembering to put the disk in offline and passing it through is not that onerous.

odditory: I'm thinking $300 for a decent 8 port card, $120 for BBU, $190 for SAS expander = $600+ That being said... when I get these HP SAS Expanders working :) I was actually thinking that this i3-530/ H55 box could be somewhat cool with a 3085/5085 or similar. Have a small WHS box controlling two SAS expander'd Norco cases...

Also, have you played around with Raid-Z2 in FreeNAS? First set of disks installed it was great.... next sets... not so great. What I may do one day is do a FreeNAS style raid-z2 box setup as an iSCSI target. May be the best of both worlds.
 
PigLover said:
Of course, MS will argue that one of the advantages of DE is that it does not use parity and stores everything as normal files. They will argue that you can take any drive out of a DE pool and take it to any system that supports NTFS, mount it and read off all the files. They will argue that you can take a partially corrupted DE pool from a fully corrupted WHS system (lost the system and parts of the pool) and still easily recover any file data from any drives that can still be read, making it much more resilient against failure than any implementation using parity. They will argue that for their target market the cost in extra disk drives is minimal compared to this benefit.

Not suggesting that I buy into this. Whether or not I or you agree with these things is not meaningful. The fact is that the product managers that deal with WHS believe these things with religious passion.

And because of that i'd bet a paycheck that you will never see official support for any form of parity within WHS or any other Microsoft product the DE finds its way into.
Click to expand...

True, but really that doesn't apply to all forms of parity protection. If it was implemented in a pseudo-RAID4 style like FlexRAID, you'd still be able to read the data from any of the (non-parity) drives in whatever other system.

Now if we could only get MS to agree. :)
 
ZetaEpyon said:
True, but really that doesn't apply to all forms of parity protection. If it was implemented in a pseudo-RAID4 style like FlexRAID, you'd still be able to read the data from any of the (non-parity) drives in whatever other system.

Now if we could only get MS to agree. :)
Click to expand...

Your likely to see peace in the middle east before MS agrees with that...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top