MS has abandoned Drive Extender for Vail

B

blackhawk777

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 10, 2010
Messages
386
"In a shock move, Microsoft today announced that it had abandoned development of Windows Home Server’s Drive Extender storage technology."

http://www.wegotserved.com/2010/11/23/microsoft-abandons-development-windows-home-server-drive-extender/


So the number one reason (come to think of it the only reason) why myself and MANY other users chose WHS has been abandoned by MS. I'm not sure what the business case was that led to this decision, but all the comments on the MS blog and the WHS blogs regarding this development are extremely negative, and now it's time to re-think local storage options that will work with a bunch of different drive types. So I reiterate to MS, WTF?
 
Last edited:
What's this mean?

I wasn't going to Vail anyway because of the file system change but what changes will be made in Vail?
 
WTF! I now have a bunch of mismatched 2 TB drives that I can't reasonably put in a RAID array!

I knew I should have gone with a real OS form the beginning! Big FU to M$!
 
Who knows what they will try to use as the final selling points for Vail, that is if they don't kill it off entirely. I have been beta testing it almost the entire time it has been available on connect, and in my opinion there really aren't any other unique features to distinguish the product from a Server 2008 R2 based setup. Drive Extender has always been the main selling point for WHS since it allows users to add any size / brand drive to the storage pool and still maintain data protection and redundancy. The dashboard was a nice addition for it's user friendly layout, but the media streaming and remote access stuff can be had with countless other solutions so those features don't add much value, just convenience since they are built in.
 
I think something like FlexRAID or UnRAID makes a lot of sense for typical home server applications. I wonder if Microsoft has any plans to build or buy similar technology for future WHS releases.
 
Aren't there some outstanding issues with flexraid though? Wasn't Treadstone having issues with flexraid view? Hell, I don't even know what flexraid view is. Is it imperative to using flexraid?
 
We don't know all the corporate marketing politics behind WHS are - and they are a very big factor in decisions like these - but I can't imagine that a team of supposedly gifted WHS developers should have any problem developing a file-based N+1 parity scheme similar to what Brahim has with Flexraid. Or worst case put Brahim on a plane to Redmond if it's that effing difficult. With the future of ZFS in limbo Microsoft really needs to take the lead in coming out with both block-based (striping) and file-based parity schemes. Make it an extension of the NTFS spec or call it something new like "MFS". But the fruit just doesn't hang any lower than this.

Using Flexraid+Flexraid-View as an example wishlist for a "MFS: Microsoft File System":

- Drives are JBOD, formatted as single NTFS partition and can be read from outside of the "pool"
- You can mix different sized drives as long as parity drive(s) are equal to or bigger than the largest drive being protected
- Non-striping, so a single drive failure doesn't impact other pool member drives (unlike ZFS)
- Pool can be expanded without penalty of additional parity drive(s) per expansion (unlike ZFS)
- CRC checksumming to protect against bitrot/bitflips

Wrap that all up in to a user-friendly interface and it would revolutionize storage for both enterprise and soho. Sadly, something this efficient will never come from Microsoft.
 
Last edited:
WTF! I now have a bunch of mismatched 2 TB drives that I can't reasonably put in a RAID array!
Click to expand...
Mismatched 2TB drives?

There's no reason why those can't be used in a RAID array.
 
S-F: I have a bunch of mis-matched drives as well and now I'm wondering the best move... should I go back to V1 even though the tech is totally outdated (but reliable) or move to one of these other solutions... either way it's not a decision I was expecting or wanting to make.
 
S-F said:
Aren't there some outstanding issues with flexraid though? Wasn't Treadstone having issues with flexraid view? Hell, I don't even know what flexraid view is. Is it imperative to using flexraid?
Click to expand...

FlexRAID can be used without FRV. The View program allows you to access all the drives as if they were a single volume. Without it, they behave like a bunch of individual HDDs.
 
odditory said:
Why don't you find out before you worry about problems with it :)
Click to expand...

I've just spent a little while browsing the site and I cont seem to find anything about it really. The descriptions of the entire product are pretty hazy.

And the drives will drop out of an array. WD greens and so on.
 
This does not surprise me one bit. Ever since the first Beta for VAIL was released DE v2 has gotten nothing but criticism because of the 12% ECC overhead, Block Level data allocation, and recoverability outside of a WHS.

Im not so sure what WHS would be like without DE tho for most people as that was the main selling point.
 
That's a great shame, MS make some real stupid decisions at times and its getting harder and harder to recommend their products within the Enterprise, never mind the home market. I would have gone with WHS if it hadn't been built on W2K3 technologies.
 
Guess I can delete that Vail trail VM off my server. Glad I was just testing in a VM. Without DEv2 there is absolutely no advantage to Vail over Server2008's file services role.
 
I had already decided to go with Server 2008 R2 and a big RAID6 array for my file sharing needs due to the 10% overhead required just to share files on Vail and now I am even HAPPIER that I did! However, I still plan to use it in a VM to do PC backups which I find to be quite an easy/painless process compared to other PC backup solutions.
 
pirivan said:
I had already decided to go with Server 2008 R2 and a big RAID6 array for my file sharing needs due to the 10% overhead required just to share files on Vail and now I am even HAPPIER that I did! However, I still plan to use it in a VM to do PC backups which I find to be quite an easy/painless process compared to other PC backup solutions.
Click to expand...

Acronis True Image Home will back up to any network location or local drive, and the 2011 version couldn't be much more user friendly. I use it to back up my office pc to our network storage every night, and it has performed the task flawlessly for over 3 months now. In addition to that, it will validate the archive once it is completed and then shut the pc down.
 
blackhawk777 said:
Acronis True Image Home will back up to any network location or local drive, and the 2011 version couldn't be much more user friendly. I use it to back up my office pc to our network storage every night, and it has performed the task flawlessly for over 3 months now. In addition to that, it will validate the archive once it is completed and then shut the pc down.
Click to expand...

+1

The backup utility in WHS is pretty unsophisticated. It's nice that you don't have to install it on the clients though, like you do with Acronis.
 
Wow, at this point I guess I am sticking with WHSv1 as well.

What I don't understand is what MS expects HP, Acer, and the rest of us to do with Vail. What is the point of it as a product?

I hope they toss DEv1 into Vail and call it a day.
 
pirivan said:
I had already decided to go with Server 2008 R2 and a big RAID6 array for my file sharing needs due to the 10% overhead required just to share files on Vail and now I am even HAPPIER that I did! However, I still plan to use it in a VM to do PC backups which I find to be quite an easy/painless process compared to other PC backup solutions.
Click to expand...

Off-topic, but can Server 2008 handle the advanced format drives natively?
 
@Foreceman

I like Acronis PRETTY well but I have had some spotty issues with driver support for mice and keyboards. I have had to plug in a PS/2 keyboard or different mouse to get it to work properly with the Acronis bootable disc too many times (yay for custom Linux distributions, driver support = lame). Also, WHS (for me) = Free (technet) and thus that makes Acronis comparatively 'expensive'. I also found Acronis full PC backups over the network to just crawllllllll (I ended up giving up on them and had them always backup to a secondary drive on the PC) and WHS backups over the network seem to fly (comparatively).

What I TRULY like about Acronis is if you get echo workstation and create hardware independent images, but it costs a lot more than free to get that feature.
 
Last edited:
I'm extremely dissapointed in the news. This means I'll need to rethink my future plans.

I've been running WHS v1 on the original HP MediaSmart Server for a couple of years now and have been planning to move to Vail on a homebuilt server when it came out, but without the Disk Extender stuff, I don't think I want to go that route.

Maybe I'll just put Win 2008 server on a RAID 5 set up and run a WHSv2 install in a Hyper-V VM instead. DE was the only reason why I wouldn't run it on a VM before.

I still want to move to Vail though. The Web Access and media streaming stuff is excellent and I already use that frequently in the Beta version of Vail.
 
Personally I'm not going to worry too much about what Vail will or won't have until the RTM. Until then anything can change, including DE.
 
While I did not like DE in Vail(high overhead, poor performance, drives not readable in other computers) I do think DE in v1 is great. The entire reason I use WHS is because of the drive pooling and data protection. I just wish it used some form of RAID other than the traditional(see unraid, flexraid, drobo)

Being able to use drives of any size and pool those drives is an absolute must. I have a ____ case that supports 22 hard drives. In it I have 2x 500gb, 4x 750gb, 6x 1tb, 2x 1.5tb and 2x 2tb. I just buy whatever is the biggest drive available when I need more space. Plug it in and add it to the pool and away I go. I have 5.2tb of movies/tv shows, alone. I'm not going to now split that across multiple raid arrays and have multiple similar shares to work with on my network.

For me, everything that was special about WHS has been removed. DE in vail was not the right path. But neither is scrapping it entirely. There are better options.
Flexraid won't work for me. But flexraid live, if it ever sees the light of day, would.

Edit - flexraid live out by christmas. very good news!
 
Last edited:
If it wasn't for DE I would never have even looked into WHS. The fact I can easily throw a couple drives into a pool and still easily duplicate what I want has been huge for me.

Also now WeGotServed is tweating
We're not done with bad news on Vail. 01.12.10.
Click to expand...

There no confusion ;)
 
Last edited:
brennok said:
Also now WeGotServed is tweating the bad news about Vail isn't finished with the date 12/1/10.
Click to expand...

What does this mean? Vail isn't finished with the date 12/1/10? How is Vail not finished with the date? Does it have some vendetta against that particular date?
 
I'm not sure what to think right now. I was planing on moving to vail in 2011 with all AF drives. I figured a nice supermicro 2x SAS w/ 8 3TB drives would be enough to keep me happy for a while coupled with nice speedy SSD for the OS drive. It was also a great platform for SageTV. Seriously...WTF.
 
I'm fairly happy I decided a few months ago that Vail was going to be more of a VM "application" for me.
 
Read this earlier, I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing now with my plans for upgrades in the future. Are there any other systems that allow arbitrary expansion of a drive pool coupled with some form of redundancy?
 
No1451 said:
Read this earlier, I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing now with my plans for upgrades in the future. Are there any other systems that allow arbitrary expansion of a drive pool coupled with some form of redundancy?
Click to expand...

unraid and flexraid.
 
odditory said:
We don't know all the corporate marketing politics behind WHS are - and they are a very big factor in decisions like these -
Click to expand...
By the wording the the initial post and the follow post, it strongly looks like Microsoft bowed to OEM/ISV wanting to "value add" something like the DE without it being part of the core OS. This isn't the first time Microsoft has been willing to cripple Windows functionality (hello working backups) for what appears to be 3rd party interests.

linky
We continue to look at ways to provide solutions for features such as data duplication, and are working with partners and OEM’s on extending both their hardware and software solutions for Vail.
Click to expand...
 
MS just seriously pissed off some of it's most loyal customers and evangilists...... Terrible move MS.

I feel like selling off all my pc crap and buy all Macs, if they can do this with Vail what is the real future of MCE?

Man, I have to completely rethink my home media setup.

Dammit MS!!!!!!!!!!
 
like the browser software whiners the data backup software makers probaly threatened some sort of monopoly law suit:p we saw how much of a joke and pain that was for MS to deal with it in Europe etc easier to say f it maybe.

iam sure shit like that plays a role in why alot of idea have not been rolled natively into windows.. MSE is sepereate, alot of windows software is seperate that could easiliy just be part of the OS from the start..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top