Thinking of replacing WHS with server 2008 R2, have questions

moose517

Gawd
Joined
Feb 28, 2009
Messages
640
I've been reading into ZFS quite a bit lately and see the ZFS guru web UI which is a plus for me, but i'm wondering if i should even attempt since i know squat about linux in general. Right now i have about 18TB of data on a WHS machine and was considering moving to either ZFS or grab a hardware raid card with server 2008 R2. I don't have much experience with server 2008 R2 either but i think i could figure out how to join it to my already setup active directory and then map shares from there when users log in here at home. My main concern however would be backups, thats the biggest feature about WHS i like, its saved me numerous times. Was also wanting to use it to experiment with like iSCSI i think it is, boot some of the PC's off the network storage vs having a HDD in the computer(HTPC is first that comes to mind)

If i were to decide to go to server 2008 R2 how hard would it be to setup for network shares that i can grow dynamically if need be using the expand function on the raid card, and then how much is involved in setting up remote disks for computers? Also what kind of hardware requirements could i be facing, right now i have an e6700 CPU in it with 4gb of ram(could upgrade to 8 if needed) and it has dual NIC's that are teamed(just no jumbo frame support).

And as a last question, is there any site or books you guys might recommend that covers basic like windows server stuff, i've setup DNS, DHCP and AD so far but i'm wanting to learn more storage stuff with it and i'm drawing a blank. Also want to incorporate exchange server into this more as practice but will use it if i can get it setup.

Hope one of you smart people can help a noob!
 
i did the same and know nothing about server OSs or real networking.

setting up shares in a workgroup is the same as on W7 no issue.

I am not running a domain. Just Hyper-V with 1 W7 VM and WHS v1 VM

YMMV
 
i did the same and know nothing about server OSs or real networking.

setting up shares in a workgroup is the same as on W7 no issue.

I am not running a domain. Just Hyper-V with 1 W7 VM and WHS v1 VM

YMMV

Gosh i really want to get off WHS as well because it will be a dying system since there is no support for larger drives.

I 2008 server sounds cool, but then you have to run WHS on it anyways right? You can't enable redundancy like WHS either correct? WHS is the exact solution I'm looking for but with support for larger drives :(

I'd be willing to try 2008 anyways, but this would require building a new system to transfer the data over to right? or is there some other way doing this to an existing system?
 
I've been reading into ZFS quite a bit lately and see the ZFS guru web UI which is a plus for me, but i'm wondering if i should even attempt since i know squat about linux in general.
Yeah that last bit pretty much states your total knowledge: The ZFS Guru Web UI is running off of BSD, not Linux. In fact, BSD and Linux aren't even the same OS platform. In addition, in general, ZFS is not recommended to be run on Linux.
If i were to decide to go to server 2008 R2 how hard would it be to setup for network shares that i can grow dynamically if need be using the expand function on the raid card?
By network shares I'm assuming you mean the size of the storage array on the server. Well it depends on which RAID card you get, the size of the RAID array, the drives type, and the RAID array type.
how much is involved in setting up remote disks for computers?
Not much IIRC.
Also what kind of hardware requirements could i be facing, right now i have an e6700 CPU in it with 4gb of ram(could upgrade to 8 if needed) and it has dual NIC's that are teamed(just no jumbo frame support).
Well you're looking at a new hardware RAID card (roughly $300 to $400 minimum) and more than likely additional drives since A) You'll need to setup an initial RAID array to move your files over to, B) if your current drives are a mix-match of different sizes and even manufacturers, and C) If your current or spare drives aren't either Hitachi or Samsung drives as other hard drive manufacturer's consumer grade hard drives tend to not play well with many true hardware RAID controllers out there.

I 2008 server sounds cool, but then you have to run WHS on it anyways right? You can't enable redundancy like WHS either correct? WHS is the exact solution I'm looking for but with support for larger drives :(
Umm, I'm assuming that you mean runnig WHS in a VM in Windows 2K8 correct? And no Windows 2K8 does not have the same drive pool feature that WHS has.
I'd be willing to try 2008 anyways, but this would require building a new system to transfer the data over to right? or is there some other way doing this to an existing system?
For simplicity's sake, yes you would have to build a new system.
 
LOL i guess that shows my knowledge on ZFS and BSD then, i assumed they were a linux variation. As for the raid card was thinking something along the lines of a areca 1680 or 1880 series, more leaning towards the 1880 though just for futureproofing. Drives are a combination of sizes and manufacturers, was hoping to just pool together the like size drives and be done.
 
Umm, I'm assuming that you mean runnig WHS in a VM in Windows 2K8 correct? And no Windows 2K8 does not have the same drive pool feature that WHS has.

I have WHS running as VM in a 2008R2 Hyper-V server. Works great. I have several drives configured to pass-thru to the WHS VM. That is, the host 2008R2 server doesn't see them as drives. It just passes them along to the WHS virtual machine. The WHS VM then uses them just as you'd expect any WHSv1 setup to use them. Seems to work great. But then I really only use it for the backup purposes. I do mirror some pictures and some media to it, but only as a backup repository (done manually).
 
LOL i guess that shows my knowledge on ZFS and BSD then, i assumed they were a linux variation. As for the raid card was thinking something along the lines of a areca 1680 or 1880 series, more leaning towards the 1880 though just for futureproofing. Drives are a combination of sizes and manufacturers, was hoping to just pool together the like size drives and be done.

Do you actually need extremely high storage performance? I.e will you be doing an extensive amount of moving data to and from your RAID array?

Also how many hard drives do you have? What manufacturers? What size? In, just list out all the hard drives you have right now at this moment in your server.
 
Back
Top