MS has abandoned Drive Extender for Vail

what a bunch of fucktards. they clearly don't understand the niche that this product fills. Guess I'll hold onto WHSv1 for quite some time now... idiots
 
Time to start looking at unRaid. WHSv1 is not going to work with my newer drives and is probably a dead product. Wish I had the $$ for Drobo, that seems like the easiest equivalent to WHS for now.
 
haxxorboi said:
Alright, so Vail is essentially DOA then for the majority of us right?

I'm running WHSv2 and honestly could use the 3TB drives soon. What are the options?

OS:
Vail (probably not anymore)
V2 (still viable, but can't use large drives)
Server 2008 (good option but lose some WHS remote features)
UnRaid (not too familiar with this)

DE Replacement:
Stick with V2 DE (still doesn't allow larger drives)
RAID5/6 (doesn't allow for different drive types)
FlexRAID (not too familiar with this)

Any additions or pro/cons for these
Click to expand...

Time to start getting familiar with what you're not familiar with. Your options if you want different drives with some sort of redundency is unraid or flexraid. Unlike raid, flexraid doesn't care about the actually disks themselves, it protects the data. There are posts here about it and of course the main site. Getting the remote features you are after is easy enough with a variety of 3rd party software.
Unraid is like raid in that you'll lose a drive to parity but you can use drives of any size. Unraid will run form a USB thumb drive.
 
Seems like the nix people are salivating right now that their long fight has been vindicated. Their hours spent toiling on their systems compared to the people who pretty much had to do nothing has been rewarded.

No seriously...this is a huge f'ing step backwards to 100's if not 10's of thousands of people and some feel it is okay because if they pour in countless hours they might get some of what they had before or if they spend more cash, they might get something near what they had before.
 
looks like ill just be sticking 10x2t drives in my whs and living with it. I think i can live with 20t of storsge :).
 
Trepidati0n said:
Seems like the nix people are salivating right now that their long fight has been vindicated. Their hours spent toiling on their systems compared to the people who pretty much had to do nothing has been rewarded.

No seriously...this is a huge f'ing step backwards to 100's if not 10's of thousands of people and some feel it is okay because if they pour in countless hours they might get some of what they had before or if they spend more cash, they might get something near what they had before.
Click to expand...
that sums it up for me.

WHS v1 was easily worth $100 in time that it saved me in education and setup of backup, JBOD folders, duplication, remote access.

WHS v2 with the improvements it is set to bring was exciting to me. With DE gone it takes a big step back.
 
Chimel said:
The argument that hard drives are now bigger and DE to consolidate smaller disks is not necessary anymore is laughable: A 42GB ripped BD is 6 times bigger than a 7GB DVD, and that's exactly the same proportion for the new 3TB disks that are starting to appear, compared to the 500GB disks at the time of WHS v1. So we haven't exactly gained anything with the bigger disks in term of storage, they just keep up with the new technologies.

And if you take the 1TB disk mentioned by MS, you can fit only 24 ripped BD on it. Hell, I can barely fit my music on a 1TB disk, with no extra space for even one ripped BD.
So DE was just as necessary for v2 than for v1, MS is just shooting at themselves, taking down their OEM partners with them. It won't encourage beta testers either.
Click to expand...

I want to know what you listen to in what format to take up 1 TB for music. I run 6 radio stations with linear .wav audio in less than 600 GB. I'm just curious.
 
the only reason i liked WHS and the only reason i use it is because of DE. what i dug about it most is that i didnt have to spend any time managing my storage. out of space, just pop a new drive in, usb even.

they need to reverse this decision fast. theres no reaosn for WHS without it. You can just buy a nas and save the money on the os.

they need to bring back drive extender. it IS WHS
 
cditty said:
I want to know what you listen to in what format to take up 1 TB for music. I run 6 radio stations with linear .wav audio in less than 600 GB. I'm just curious.
Click to expand...
There's good music in every genre, so I listen to everything and then some!
I was using SAM Broadcaster at some stage, but that stupid version accepted only MP3s.

752 GB of lossless WMAs and the same in 144 GB of MP3s for mobile usage.
553 artists, 3029 CDs, 39229 songs. Main genres:
- Classical: 757 hours
- Rock: 337 h
- French: 184 h
- World: 116 h
- Jazz: 115 h
- Blues: 110 h
- Alternatif: 109 h
- Celtic: 151 h
- Soul & R&B: 99 h
- Pop: 69 h
- Country: 63 h
- Latin: 48 h
- Metal: 44 h
- Electronic: 36 h
- Cajun & Zydeco: 35 h
And many other genres with less than 20 hours each. You? Which radios?
 
hmm....I'll wait to see how this plays out, but as of now, it looks like I won't upgrade to Vail. Too bad. I've been looking forward to the new version for almost a year
 
Seriously, I don't see the big deal here. The current release of Windows Home Server (non Vail) works pretty well. This has not been a profit getter for Microsoft. However, Small Business Server will be. Now, the big fuss people used to put up was "Why won't Microsoft support RAID on WHS". Well, now they will. Frankly, I would rather have a home server in RAID 1 with a USB backup anyway.

Microsoft is making good decisions on products right now. While WHS has a cult like following, it is not large scale by any means in the big picture. I own one and I like it, but it already does what I need it to. I will use it until it has a hardware failure and at that point, I will probably just virtualize a server on my multi core, always on desktop PC.
 
cditty said:
Seriously, I don't see the big deal here. The current release of Windows Home Server (non Vail) works pretty well. This has not been a profit getter for Microsoft. However, Small Business Server will be. Now, the big fuss people used to put up was "Why won't Microsoft support RAID on WHS". Well, now they will. Frankly, I would rather have a home server in RAID 1 with a USB backup anyway.

Microsoft is making good decisions on products right now. While WHS has a cult like following, it is not large scale by any means in the big picture. I own one and I like it, but it already does what I need it to. I will use it until it has a hardware failure and at that point, I will probably just virtualize a server on my multi core, always on desktop PC.
Click to expand...

Current release is 32-bit Server 2003. For people that want to use the machine for more tasks, this is a drawback.

The DE was the main draw to WHSv1. No expensive raid cards, easy expansion. Now, there is no reason to use WHSv2 over Server 2008 (possibly price). If you have to buy a raid card, the cost of the card itself is almost 2x the cost of some WHSv1 boxes.

Windows 7 has a decent backup, so the WHSv1 backup engine won't be missed unless you are using XP/Vista.

SBS might be an option, but it is not designed for "normal" home users, and has a lot of options/abilities that will confuse them.

Basically there are no more Microsoft options that would be super easy to set up for a parent/relative that they can monitor on their own, depending on what exactly WHSv2 will do and require.
 
Agree with other posts, DE is THE big feature of WHS.

People that say "Just use RAID" are not thinking it through. Part of the beauty of DE was how stupid it was. The files were just stored twice. There was no single point failure that would make you lose your data short of a massive power surge or seriously corrupted RAM. Bad MB? Replace the MB, reinstall WHS, plug in the drives, voila, DE drives back. Bad drive? Put in replacement one, fixed. Lose OS drive? Put in new one, reinstall WHS, plug in DE drives, done. Still not working? Take drive to separate machine and plug in, read off all the files.

RAID does not match this fault tolerance simplicity. It can certainly kick some performance butt and handle multiple disk failures, but the RAID controller is always the achilles heel. I have seen at least a dozen RAID arrays lost because we could not get a replacement controller card with the exact same firmware.

Some of the comments about flexraid are intriguing. I will definitely look into that.
 
Looks like I have no reason to stop me from moving to unraid now other than the license cost. Was gonna go Vail, but not anymore.
 
S-F said:
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$!
Click to expand...

Same here! I have enough 2TB drives for a RAID5, but they're all WD greens (not RAID-friendly from what I've read), and they're a mixture of EADS and EARS (aka advanced format/4096 bytes/sector). I also have about $200 sunk into those Supermicro JBOD-only cards which will become paperweights.

The backup system is nice, but Drive Extender was by far the biggest (really almost the only) selling point for me buying into WHS. WTF were they thinking?

I now have to either keep humping along with the aging WHS v1 until they discontinue support, or rethink my entire home network at substantial cost. I'll look into some of the Linux-based options but I'm pretty happy with my virtualized Server 2008 R2 system and I have not found a Linux distro that plays nicely with Hyper-V without a lot of effort.
 
Archer75 said:
Time to start getting familiar with what you're not familiar with. Your options if you want different drives with some sort of redundency is unraid or flexraid. Unlike raid, flexraid doesn't care about the actually disks themselves, it protects the data.
Click to expand...


My understanding of FlexRAID (and I sympathize with the OP...it's hard to figure out exactly what this software does just by reading the FAQs which I find vague) is that it doesn't do anything to directly create a drive pool. I think you basically just set it up with a list of directories or sets of files to protect and it takes a parity snapshot every so often, much like those PAR and PAR2 utilities that people use to protect multi-part RAR files for torrents and such. Then it stores the parity off somewhere or other, presumably in files of some sort living on a drive formatted with the OS'es native filesystem (again, hard to tell without a deep dive into the docs or actually using it). It's still up to the user to figure out how to implement the storage, whether it's DE, RAID, LVM, etc. So it's more of an enabling technology than a drive pooling format in itself, since it lets you use a normally very risky (e.g. LVM) scheme with less danger of data loss.

At least that's how I think it works. As I say, it's hard to get a concrete idea from the Wikis and FAQs which all seem to be full of vague stuff about how it's a new way of doing things, units of risk, DRUs, PPUs, blah blah.
 
It seems like there's a lot of confusion about Flexraid and how it works, based on all the speculative posts about it. It's really not anything mystical. If you want more info there are tutorials and setup instructions in the Flexraid forums. I do have to say it suffers from a lack of "simplified presentation" and that's held it back from wider adoption, and led to confusion. That's a direct result of the lack of cohesive (read dummy proof) client GUI, since up to now Brahim has focused most of his attention on perfecting the RAID engine. I get the sense he's more of a technical wizard than a marketing guy, and if given the option I'll take the technical guy any day, but that's why things like his website and client GUI aren't as polished as they could otherwise be.

Right now he has three offerings:

Flexraid (snapshot, file-based, non-striping parity with support for an unlimited number of parity drives (think triple or quad parity raid)
Flexraid-View (drive pooling, aka combining JBODs into a single "view" or share)
Flexraid-Live (realtime, file-based, non-striping parity) which will supposedly be released in a month or two.

I already encouraged him to get busy and grab the WHS v2 SDK and begin work on a DE-like engine + management plugin for WHS, based on Flexraid tech. This would be an excellent opportunity for him to capitalize on Microsoft's gaffe now that his engine has really matured.
 
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i was hoping VAIL could be my answer to Advanced Format drives and 2.1TB+ HDDs...

no DE = no WHS

time to research alternatives for my future storage needs... FlexRAID looks interesting
 
odditory said:
I already encouraged him to get busy and grab the WHS v2 SDK and begin work on a DE-like engine + management plugin for WHS, based on Flexraid tech. This would be an excellent opportunity for him to capitalize on Microsoft's gaffe now that his engine has really matured.
Click to expand...

This is what I'm hoping for, something simple enough for a user like me(one of those dummies odditory mentioned:p) but robust enough to replace DE. Make it a paid addon and I would gladly shell out the cash for it.
 
sabregen said:
what a bunch of fucktards. they clearly don't understand the niche that this product fills. Guess I'll hold onto WHSv1 for quite some time now... idiots
Click to expand...

Exactly how I feel. The only reason I, and many, many other people, got WHS was for the ability to pool drives, not for the other crap. I am having issues with WHS now in which the demigrator is causing really shotty access. I was looking into Vail and its new splicing DE service which works(ed) on a level closer to hardware. I wasn't too thrilled with its implementation of the 2GB splices but I was going to give it a shot and see how it performed. Not anymore obviously. Oh well, I guess Ill just keep what I have now or hope another implementation comes along that allows for the flexibility like WHS.

From that second update article, the only thing I heard was 'Blah blah blah, we suck, blah blah blah'.
 
WHS for enthusiasts was/is a great way to recycle drives conveniently without having to think much. But most of the mass market OEM stuff is limited to four to six drives. They can probably use motherboard RAID-1, and insist on drives being bought as pairs with locked firmware... they will love that.

Most of the people complaining about this just aren't the MS target market I guess. It's like me complaining about no RDP or VPN in WP7... it's just not on the mass market radar, even if it pisses off a few IT professionals and enthusiasts.

Anyway, what will I do? If I upgrade to Vail, or just use 2008 R2, I guess I could cope with hardware RAID volumes treated as Windows spanned dynamic disks, so that I can have one file share and redundancy. Alternatively, mount the RAID volumes as folders - although that will mean I have to worry more about space. Although some of the drives I've used with WHS defnitely wouldn't behave in RAID...

My WHS server is hyper-v capable. I could use 3TB drives easily, without losing WHS redundancy, by having two WHS VMs, dividing each 3TB drive into a 2TB and 1TB VHD, and giving them to the two WHS VMs. That way I still don't have to worry much about what drives I use. One WHS can handle backup and file shares, the other just file shares... Getting LightsOut to work will be a challenge though...
 
At this point I think, like several others have suggested, my course of action will be to move the primary file serving duties away from WHS, and perhaps run a Vail instance in a VM to handle backups, remote access, and possibly media streaming duties, along with whatever handful of add-ins I want to run (i.e LightsOut).
 
funny as well as i was an an Microsoft event today and they had an Whole presentation about it was saying that DE was the new wonderful thing (he fully stated that WHS V2 and SBS 2011 E would have when it seems like its not i guess he did not get the memo)
 
WHS without DE can still be a viable solution, as it is the cheapest version of Windows Server that the home user can grab.
So you can maybe set up a DFS root or use the alternatives mentioned by Archer75, odditory and others.
But a Linux or a FreeNAS box if you have lots of storage to manage seems even more worth considering now.

There are still some interesting features in Vail, like the possibility of streaming videos over the Internet, I'll wait for the released version to make up my mind.
 
All the other features in WHS other than DE are basically fluff -

- Backup is now built into Windows 7
- No one cares about picture sharing or the remote website. You can do it easily using a number of free solutions
- Remote desktop is better done via Live Mesh, which also gives you syncing
- Remote media streaming is only useful if you have massive upstream bandwidth.

MS wanted to sell Vail to businesses (Aurora). DEv2 is a total rewrite and is half-baked at best. Consumers hated it, and no one was ever gonna trust it since it sits below NTFS. So they decided to focus on the business market, and told us users to go to hell.

Has anyone used Amahi/Greyhole? From what I read its still extremely primitive -

- written in php :eek:
- still uses a landing zone (like WHS before PP2)
- most operations still need to be done via cmd line
- its an addon on top of Fedora rather than being part of the OS
 
I can't say that this was an irrational decision. The existence of WHS would have killed sales for any future "Microsoft TV" product.
 
thefreeaccount said:
I can't say that this was an irrational decision. The existence of WHS would have killed sales for any future "Microsoft TV" product.
Click to expand...

Can you expand on this? I would think WHS with MC integration would be a perfect match for MicrosoftTv, which I envision to be a simplified Xbox, with support for streaming from various sources (much like GoogleTv) and which runs the Mediaroom software (http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/04/telus-brings-iptv-to-canadian-xbox-360s/). e.g. network storage would be used by multiple clients as their dvr. Who knows, in the future you could even have tuner support.
 
I agree with all the hate comments, WHS for me is running great and the main reason I went with it over a linux based solution was because DE and the whole system is just so easy to setup. I don't need anything else but DE and support for larger 2+ TB HDs. For me this is just terrible news. Vail went from Highly interested to not interested at all.
 
Archer75 said:
Some alternatives for those who are interested, perhaps we can start pooling info on the closest replacements for WHS that offer drive pooling and the ability to use drives of any size.

greyhole in amahi: http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Greyhole
http://code.google.com/p/greyhole/
http://www.amahi.org/

Flexraid:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexRAID
http://www.openegg.org/FlexRAID.curi

Unraid:
http://www.lime-technology.com/
http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Wiki
Click to expand...

Thanks for this... now i have to do some more reading :)

Concerning FlexRaid, one thing I haven't figured out from the "documenation" is if it is a scheduled snapshot or if you have to manually snapshot the information. I have a strong feeling I will be leaning more towards UnRaid...

Now the question is how to add the other items from WHS that I use...
1) Messageboards (used MySQL and PHP plugins to host SMF messageboards on my WHS)
2) Photo sharing - This was really popular with family memebers so they could download/upload pictures from our server
3) File sharing - No...not talking about P2P :p My gaming group uses my WHS server as a file "repository" for digital copies of RPG books. Basically a digital book shelf.

I'm sure there are plenty of options out there, but how many of them are as simple to set up and manage as WHS (especially #2 and #3). I'm guessing I can just create a Server08 box, install IIS and FTP services, and install the forum software and that would probably get everything except the photo sharing. I'd also need to install a DDNS application, like for DynDNS to update the entries when the my dynamic IP address changes (something WHS automatically does). Anyone got any suggestions for easy and quick website creation for the front page of the server?

I'm not saying WHS was perfect, but it was nice becuase it "just worked" for me and I could still customize it as I needed without a lot of thought/work. I don't have time to come home and have to "tinker" with the server just to get these basic features working..
 
the idea of a flexraid UI as an addin for Vail or SBS sounds like a great idea. I know I love the free DNS server and port forwarding of WHS and the client backups are great...

if there is a good replacement for DE and it is flexraid than I will still be happy, just need to learn new tech.


I know I would pay for an addin for flexraid for Vail.
 
Ive been using WHS for a couple years now and its been a great product for the most part. It made my setup effortless. It hasn't been perfect, but I was really looking forward to see what MS would add to it with Vail.

From everything Ive seen about this, it looks like MS ran into a wall with DE v2 that was so bad they would rather scrap it than try to rush it into the final product. On the one hand, it sucks they had to scrap it so long into development, but I certainly wouldn't want some rushed version that led to issues for me when I used it.

Im going to give MS the benefit of the doubt on this one and wait for the final release before I decide what to do. I wouldn't want to jump to conclusions just yet and throw all of my plans out the window, only to find out that the official release has something as good or better. Ive seen enough times when another solution comes about before final release.

Apparently MS is making a big deal about announcements at CES, so we might be surprised with replacement pieces that can serve a similar purpose as DE. If not, and it loses any similar feature, then Ill weigh my options.
 
MrCrispy said:
All the other features in WHS other than DE are basically fluff -

- Backup is now built into Windows 7
Click to expand...
It has back up, but as someone that has used WHS to restore full systems as well as individual files fairly often, the WHS backup is much better.
- No one cares about picture sharing or the remote website. You can do it easily using a number of free solutions
Click to expand...
There are other solutions, and I've looked at them. IMHO they are good replacements for WHS v1, but the Vail remote access and media streaming is on a different level. I really love the file browsing and downloading set up as well. There is no way I can implement anything as nice another way.
- Remote media streaming is only useful if you have massive upstream bandwidth.
Click to expand...
I tend to only use it for Music, but my FIOS gives 5MB upstream, which is more than enough bandwidth for it.


At this point, I am fairly sure that I am still going to use Vail when it's released. It's just going to be in a VM running on a RAID 5 array.
 
farscapesg1 said:
Thanks for this... now i have to do some more reading :)

Concerning FlexRaid, one thing I haven't figured out from the "documenation" is if it is a scheduled snapshot or if you have to manually snapshot the information. I have a strong feeling I will be leaning more towards UnRaid...
Click to expand...

I'm not sure. Though flexraid live is coming next month and then you won't have to worry about snapshots
 
Chimel said:
There's good music in every genre, so I listen to everything and then some!
I was using SAM Broadcaster at some stage, but that stupid version accepted only MP3s.

752 GB of lossless WMAs and the same in 144 GB of MP3s for mobile usage.
553 artists, 3029 CDs, 39229 songs. Main genres:
- Classical: 757 hours
- Rock: 337 h
- French: 184 h
- World: 116 h
- Jazz: 115 h
- Blues: 110 h
- Alternatif: 109 h
- Celtic: 151 h
- Soul & R&B: 99 h
- Pop: 69 h
- Country: 63 h
- Latin: 48 h
- Metal: 44 h
- Electronic: 36 h
- Cajun & Zydeco: 35 h
And many other genres with less than 20 hours each. You? Which radios?
Click to expand...

Thanks for that. Lots of Genre's for you. I am in terrestrial radio. We have Country, Hip-Hop, Classic Hits, Urban AC, Gospel, & a News/Talk. All the music is .wav, however the commercials are mp2's. The entire building takes around 580 GB. Granted, the Hip-Hop & Country don't have extremely large libraries... But, the Classic Hits & Urban AC do.
 
jebo_4jc said:
At this point I think, like several others have suggested, my course of action will be to move the primary file serving duties away from WHS, and perhaps run a Vail instance in a VM to handle backups, remote access, and possibly media streaming duties, along with whatever handful of add-ins I want to run (i.e LightsOut).
Click to expand...

That's kind of my thinking as well. Vail in a VM for client backups, and a 4-8 TB RAID5 running in the Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V partition for main storage (or maybe run another instance of Server 2008 R2 in a VM for the file server?). Then, take some of my orphaned green drives and put them in an external enclosure for server backups, assuming I can find a backup program for Server 2008 R2 that can span a JBOD. Or else use some sort of FlexRAID solution to protect the server. After experimenting a bit with a 3x1TB RAID5 the other day, I'm getting much better and more consistent large-file-copy throughput on my GigE (compared to WHS). So now I kind of want to go full RAID, if I can keep the upgrade costs reasonable.
 
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