WHS Possible Setup

So i have been playing around with WHS and i am really liking the backup and restore feature. it seems to work rather well. My plan is to run a WHS in my current test box in my home network. But i have heard that there is no option to backup the server it self and i was wondering. What if you had 2 home servers. and they backed each other up. Would that solve that issue. For those interested here is my current WHS setup.

Intel Atom 330
Intel ITX Mobo
1GB G.skill PC-6400 DDR2
320GB Seagate 7200.11
30GB WD EIDE
20GB WD EIDE
Norco RPC-230 2U Chassis
Corsair CX400

I am planning on installing 4x 1TB of WD Black Editions. so i can have 2 TB of replicated drive space. I am also planning on still having my other raid nas system up and running but i am hesitant on using WHS due to the lack of support for RAID arrays. I am have been playing with windows storage server 2k8 and seem to like it quite a bit. I have used linux based nas operating systems and have found their performance to not be very good.

Rather than the Atom 330, maybe look into the lower end AMD based chips such as the LE-1250. They can be underclocked to a point that your power consumption will be roughly at what the Atom draws, but at better performance. Also, the Atom 330 may be too slow for WHS2. Not sure why you plan on going with 4x WD Blacks, but I would say the WD Green is a much better choice.

1. my lower amd is going into my larger file server.
2. i am only using it strickly for backup and restore so unless whs2 is a billion times better at that feature i see no need to upgrade it
3, i would agree except that i already own the drives. I am planning on use 2TB drives in my 20 drive nas going forward and as such can spare 4 drives from my current array for this.

now i just need to find a cheap pci 2 port sata controller.

I may have an found a remedy to the backup issue, but this was due to an unfortunate event.I had nearly lost 6+ TB of data.

I started noticing my system drive collecting bad sectors over time. This server has been running a little over a year now. Last week I noticed bad clusters jumped from 133 to 900+ and the drive began running REALLY slow. I knew it was time to do something as this system drive was destined to go down at any time. I tried to do a clone of WHS system drive using a method I had found that others had confirmed working using Acronis. When I attempted to do this clone, it got to 70% reaching these bad clusters and it errored out several times, so I decided this was just not going to work for me......

I decide to do a complete WHS install, but this time doing research into RAID on WHS. I purchased two 500GB drives and a RAID card for the WHS system and was successful at setting them up as a RAID 1 for the system drive only. Before going to far into this I wanted to confirm if data on one of the RAID drives got corrupt/erased that it would restore the mirror. Confirmed working. I tried several other scenarios of a crashing WHS system such as moving RAID card to another system, disconnecting 1 of the RAID drives, everything I could think of. This took ALOT of time and work, but wanted to fail-safe my final WHS as much as possible - and this was the solution I came up with.

I have found RAID 1 on WHS does work, but it is benificial on the system drive only. everything else(data) on WHS is handled by WHS with folder duplication, this way if a data drive fails it will not be completely lost.

My WHS is now running 10 HDD's, 2 as RAID 1 for system and 8 for the storage pool. This gives me a total usable server space of 9.5 TB. (advertised storage space is 11TB total...500GBx2(raid)....1TBx4......1.5TBx4)

I was very lucky to not have lost any of my data, but at the same time it was a VERY long proccess to restore it all from the old WHS setup......I spent a little over a week with all of this testing before finally having a working WHS again.

This server runs Gigabyte EP45-UD3L MB, Intel E5300. More power than what you would probably want to use, but it is using 10 hdd's. Seeing from my battery backup it is using aprox. 120w running 24/7.

While Dad has a good idea with raiding the OS drive, from my experience, its not so much as losing the whole OS but rather pieces of it. What happened to me was the OS would hiccup and lose the tombstone, etc. Well guess what, If you have a raid 1 setup, you still probably gonna lose that tombstone. And guess whats even better than that??? When WHS loses a tombstone, regardless of if the data is still there, even if its duplicated......no tombstone = no data. What I ended up doing ( as many others have) is to run 2 servers, one backed up to another. You may lose an OS, but a reinstalls not that hard, and its a real backup solution.


What I am doing now, is building a new WHS system for a server. And will run a Freenas machine on the side to back up the WHS.

hmm sounds interesting Jay2472000, Can you elaborate on this more your plans on the whole set up of backing up your WHS to that freenas box? What will you be backing up and how large will the freenas be to achieve the back up? Something I need to look into also.

I have been strictly a windows guy so It's all new to me with freenas.

Jay,

Your solution will work as well, but to just clarify.....

When I was loosing the drive, I did a new instalation of WHS on the RAID1. I just took out all the data drives first and after WHS new install I put them in 1 by 1 into my main system. Then looking at the drives, you must let explorer show all hidden and system files. This way I could copy all of the data from the hidden folder X:/DE/SHARES, as long as I copied all of the files from each drive to the respective new directory on the server, all my data was restored...........all this was done without any of the old tombstones from previous WHS install.

This shows that it is possible to restore all your data without any tombstones and from a non-WHS OS. It is just time consuming, but worth it if you do loose your WHS OS. It took me two days of non-stop copying 6TB of data back to the server. To verify this if you get a chance try taking out one of your data pool drives and connect to another computer....just make sure to select to show all hidden files in explorer.....you will see all the data on that drive( x:/de/shares will show up as a hidden folder on all of your pooled drives).

But I do agree with you on the backup thing......I have a 1TB External USB drive that backs up my very most important files off the server and the put the drive away, updating the backed up data every few months or so. Its just just a PITA to do a WHS reinstall and is time consuming......hence my reason for the RAID 1 OS.

Also......my RAID 1 is setup through a RAID card.....not off the motherboard.....this way if my motherboard fails......RAID card can be put into another system and WHS will still work, WHS will just reconfigure itself to the new hardware. I've tested this extensively and it does work. If you run RAID off of the MB controller and change MB's WHS will crash and not boot.

BTW.....another bonus of adding a RAID card is that now I can use 10 drives in my WHS system, instead of just 6. With this I upgraded from 8TB to 12TB

My opinion is that this is overall a less costly solution than building and running a secondary server........especially if I get near 12TB of data.

Dad of three,
which RAID card you using? Does it also have Intel IOP on it?

Pug, I am going to use WHS for my main server mainly because of its simplicity, and the ability to do bare metal backups of other computers and also the ease of implementing those backups.. ( seriously, restoring or upgrading a pc thats been backed up to WHS is a dream come true, its so easy) Now the Freenas came about because I had 2 WHS, and one worked fine, and another was nothing but pure problems. Now, I will admit, I was running on older hardware, so that may have been part of the problem. Just suffice to say, I pretty much had it with WHS. Search Google for Freenas, its pretty neat. Unfortunately I am very very limited with any of the BSD OS so I cant fully exploit it yet.

Dad, I understand what youre saying about the data still being there. I am having to go thru recovering all my data myself as my WHS mobo died on me, and am using an external esata enclosure. I just think that all the trouble of setting up a raid 1 system to protect the OS is not ideal, especially when anything goes wrong, reinstall is reccomended to fix it ( I HATE that about WHS, any little thing goes wrong and you have to reinstall) I dont know, it seems actually easier to just reinstall than to go thru the trouble of manually finding files thru X/DE/SHARES Now with that said, I believe your server will have more uptime than mine.


The reason people run 2 WHS ( or other types, IE one WHS and one Freenas) is that WHS is great. Right up until it pukes all over your data. Remember, were talking about a server here, not a backup solution.


Pug, as it sits I have about 4 Tb of data. 3.7Tb to be exact. I was running dual WHS because like I said, its a server not a backup solution and with my first WHS I had it lose some tombstones and I basically had to go in and delete the fiiles, then re-put them on the server. That worries me, lol, so I decided to have it in 2 places. Oh, and yes, I was running one 8 Tb server at first, WITH duplication, but once that tombstone is gone, as far as WHS is concerned, so is the data.

No, unfortunately not hardware RAID.

It is using a SIIG 4 channel RAID (SC-SA4R12-S2) which I paid 60$ for.

There are much better options out there for RAID but I could not justify spending 300-500$ for RAID, especially when the network would be the bottleneck anyways.

It does seem to be running fine, and has not seemed to make WHS any slower.

I get 75-85 MB/s with HD Tune bench, where as I get 90-100MB/s with onboard controller (intel ICH10).
As well I get 60-100MB/s file transfers between home-pcs and wired network to the server. This server is mainly used for Music/DVD/BR collection and TV recordings - and video all streams well so it serves its main purpose. I am using onboard realtek 8111 network controller.

Still doing considerations on changing this, just haven't decided if the $$$ are worth it.


UPDATE: Just purchase and installed a different RAID card: Highpoint RocketRAID 2300 @ $110, Its performance is far superior to the SiiG card. The SiiG card was using too much processor resources. Now to do a reinstall of WHS and copy all my data again

I use WHS as my main file server and SageTV server. I also have a freenas box set up as a backup system. Using scheduling Assistant, I run SyncToy on the WHS every night at 4am and echo all of my shared folders to the freenas box. Since there is no good way to back up the WHS system drive where the applications live, I use CrashPlan to backup the SageTV config files to another system.

If my WHS system disk dies on me, I'll reinstall WHS on a new drive, recreate my shared folders, and then just tell SyncToy to echo everything back to the new WHS shared folders. That's the least labor intensive way that I can come up with to handle it right now. Having a gigabit network is key for this kind of set up.

Setting up a RAID 1 for the WHS system disk is very interesting idea. I might do that next time I rebuild my server (probably when WHS2 comes out).

I am sorry for the of topic question, but I've heard of WHS2 A few times in this forum.

Is there a projected release date for WHS2?

Add another drive and designate it as a "backup" drive. It will only be used for server backups.

I prefer a USB drive for this. I keep it at the office and only bring it home to do a new backup.

I do use a USB drive to backup my most sensitive files, but that does not help much with remaining 10TB that is a time consuming PITA to restore.

Dad_of_Three said:

I am sorry for the of topic question, but I've heard of WHS2 A few times in this forum.

Is there a projected release date for WHS2?

Click to expand...

Nothing official yet. There seems to be some optimism it will be released in 2010 though.

Dad_of_Three said:

I am sorry for the of topic question, but I've heard of WHS2 A few times in this forum.

Is there a projected release date for WHS2?

Click to expand...

Search for "Windows Home Server Vail" on Google and you will quickly get up to speed. Some sites predict a 2010 release date, but there's no hard evidence of that. From the leaks that have been talked about, it looks like it is in private testing now. You can find lots of screen shots at various sites.

Search for Vail in this forum.

There are two long threads about them in here

thanks for the ideas. something to think about. I like the raid 1 on the OS drive and the Freenas back up.

Definately try to keep your important data backed up. And a duplicated folder in WHS doesnt count. If its not a lot ( ie less than, oh say 2 Tb) I would just go external for the simplicity. If its a lot youll need something more elaborate.

you could get something like a SAS tape backup or an iosafe external drive.