Windows Storage Server?

A

Azhar

Fixing stupid since 1972
Joined
Jan 9, 2001
Messages
18,877
I came across this in my Technet software list. Never noticed it before. Could anyone tell me if there's any advantage to using WSS 2008 R2 to WHS 2011 for a media server?

My media server will consist of six 2TB drives in normal SATA (not RAID'd). I planned to use wither WHSv1 with drive pooling or WHS 2011 with StableBits Drive Pooler addon. Does Windows Storage Server R2 2008 offer something similar?
 
Azhar said:
I came across this in my Technet software list. Never noticed it before. Could anyone tell me if there's any advantage to using WSS 2008 R2 to WHS 2011 for a media server?

My media server will consist of six 2TB drives in normal SATA (not RAID'd). I planned to use wither WHSv1 with drive pooling or WHS 2011 with StableBits Drive Pooler addon. Does Windows Storage Server R2 2008 offer something similar?
Click to expand...

Not without a third party storage driver. There are a few of these including an open source one.
 
It's just going to be a CIFS file server delivering movies to 5 media centers in my home. At the moment I'm using 2 BlackArmor NAS 220 4TB units, but one of the unit has a failing IO board, so I'm going to pull the drive out after I copy the contents over to two other 2TB drives (because the BlackArmor units made the drives EXT3 anyways).

I'm still trying to decide which OS to use. I've been experimenting with FreeNAS and while I figured out how to make a credential-less login (creating a password-less guest account), I'm not impressed with it's lack of other features, like not being able to pooling the drives together.

Right now I'm trying out WHSv1 on the spare computer to see if it's doable instead of WHS 2011. I can't test 2011 until my new server come in because my spare only has 2GB RAM with shared integrated video. WHS 2011 requires 2GB dedicated system memory to install.
 
I believe you are seeing "Windows Storage Server", which is being confused with "Windows Storage Server Essentials".

WSSE is based on the Colorado family along with WHS and Small Business Server Essentials.

WSS is an add-on to Windows Server that enables things like iSCSI (before it being freeware), single instance storage, etc.

OP - for your needs, WHS should be fine.
 
cafcwest is right.

I'm testing 2008R2, WHS 2011 now and have been running WHS v1 since May 2009. This is my initial observations. My purpose is a media server for A/Vrecordings, backup, storage, no need or live RAID/ZFS.

WHS v1 has been very good to me, current uptime is over 3 months, but it has flaws. It is slow, drove me nuts with video playback issues until I got demigrator scheduled to only run during the night. This computer still goes crazy doing who knows what during various times all night long. I hate it in this respect.

WHS 2011 seems a lot faster, I have Drive Pool installed to test with and it seems to work ok so far in the few days I've been running it. I tried to do a test backup from a Win7 PC to the WHS 2011 pool and it didn't work as I expected. It seems to only want to back up to an external drive, not to the pool. I am testing with an Intel DH61WW board and i3-2100 CPU with a 2.5" OS drive and 5 Samsung 2TB drives, it will idle at 24W vs 90W+ on my old Q6600 WHS v1 box with only 4 drives. I'd like to run Snapraid on this but am not sure it would work with Drive Pool. It will drag and drop copy files at 100MBytes/sec between Win7 boxes.

Server 2008R2 installed and also installed the iSCSI 3.3 add on. It seems to work well, but I just used dynamic combined storage to test write speed to the 2 iSCSI drives.

Crystal Diskmark on iSCSI disks (WD640AAKS and Seagate 500GB)
Reads are 96MBytes/sec
Writes are 92MBytes/sec

There are likely some cripplizations done to WHS 2011 vs Server 2008R2, don't have specs on both now. Both versions seem to be working well coming out of sleep.

If interested in Linux you might want to try OpenMediaVault, it was the only distro that would copy files via CIFS at the same speed as Windows, most others were getting about 30MB/s.

Jim
 
Files copied to my test WHSv1 machine at a healthy 90-104Mbps, so transfer isn't really an issue. Besides, even 30MBps would be a nice improvement over the transfer rate to my existing BlackArmor unit (I will never recommend this unit to anyone except for simplicity for non-tech-savvy users. They're abyssmally slow.)

If WHS 2011 is better than v1, then perhaps the transfer rate will remain the same or improve. I was going to say screw it and stay with WHSv1 that worked well, but in another thread someone mentioned v1 not being able to recognize some 2TB drives and I'd rather not take any chances.
 
I'm going to try out Windows Server 2012 RC when I get a chance, I have my old file server ready to go. Has that drive pooling software I want to play with. You might and see if you have that available in your technet (I have professional)
 
My disks are full on WHSv1 reads are about 65MB/s and writes about 35MB/s so I can't compare. I like the way 2011 behaves vs v1. Remember that gigabit LAN will max out at ~100MB/s. I only have 2TB drives, nothing larger to test. Formatted they are only about 1.85TB.

I looked at the 2012 products previews, immediately tried the parity and write speeds started fast but quickly dropped down to almost nothing, punted it. In addition the drivers I needed for SageTV did not work under 2012 at the time. I don't want to get using 2012 and then have it stop working when the RC expires either. For my needs parity would be ideal if it worked. This link pretty well summed up my 2012 experience, see the parity test.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1676726

Jim
 
Last edited:
hotcrandel said:
I'm going to try out Windows Server 2012 RC when I get a chance, I have my old file server ready to go. Has that drive pooling software I want to play with. You might and see if you have that available in your technet (I have professional)
Click to expand...

2012 has pooling back? That would be awesome! I'm not about to commit 4+ TB worth movies to a beta operating system that'll expire though. Let us know how it works for you!
 
Azhar said:
2012 has pooling back? That would be awesome! I'm not about to commit 4+ TB worth movies to a beta operating system that'll expire though. Let us know how it works for you!
Click to expand...

There are other posts on this, but the write performance is supposed to be very very bad right now. So read up first before you get too excited.
 
The new storage subsystem in Windows Server 2012 / Windows 8 is called Storage Spaces. Its the spiritual successor to Drive Extender. You can do 2-way mirror (a la WHSv1), 3-way mirror, and parity. Parity has been tested to have abysmal write performance. There are other issues as well, so I'd say since it's still in beta, it's too early to bet the farm on it.
 
We have been evaluating Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012 betas (and now RC) for a while and it has been less than spectacular. SES support is still broken, randomly lighting failure LEDS on arrays so often they look like Christmas lights. Cluster failover also isn't working well, with corruption issues happening more often than I would like. That said, performance has been improving with each release and stability has increased so I have high hopes MS will get it together. For more on what SS can do in general (and for WS2012 in particular) you can read more at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29002
 
For someone in the market for a storage solution, would you recommend waiting until WS2012 is released or do you not foresee enough improvement by then?
 
I opted for Windows Home Server 2011 with Stablebit Drive Pool. The addon was just $19 and it's super easy to use and it doesn't wipe my NTFS formatted drives filled with my media files when adding the drive to the pool.

I'm really happy with my new media storage server. Thanks all for the advices.

Cool1Net6, buy yourself an annual Technet Professional license. You'll be able to use anything you want, anytime you want. It's a huge money saver at the end of the day with the sheer amount of computers I have in the house.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top