WHS 2011 and Network Share

[Nutter281]

Hi Guys

Long time reader, quite seldom have anything valuable worth talking about, but here goes. I've been using WHS Vail off and on for a few months now and I like so much about it with a few sticking points.

- Limited on amount of RAM and CPU cores/sockets it can access
(Not a huge deal to most for a simple file server, but I want one box that can be a file server and a transcoding station for recorded TV and various other task offloads so dual sockets is nice - already have dual socket board and RAM aplenty and I hate to not use it because MSFT decides to depopulate support for them)

- The file storage system is, in many ways, its own virtual disk image. Not terrible, but it scares me that if the OS completely crashes or I want to dual boot to another OS, I can only really access those files from a WHS Vail stack. Tried dual booting with Server 2008 R2 and all of the files appear to be completely unreadable.


I'm a mechanical engineer (CS/EE/CEs go ahead and point/laugh) so while I can understand what I'm taught in this space, I'm not great with linux or web coding or making any vpn other than LogMeIn work. I don't care about WHS local abilities, it really doesn't offer much that simple Windows 7 doesn't. What I REALLY like is its awesome remote access features for a simple man as myself and my family in a diffferent state (exponentially less technical even) to share and upload photos and home videos (just had a new baby!); that sort of thing.

What I would ideally like to do (and this will sound like scratching your left ear with your right hand) is keep my rock solid windows server 2008 r2 server box operating as is (has worked great for a while now) and run WHS 2011 in a Hyper-V session on top utilizing it's remote access capabilities as a "remote gateway" so to speak with all of the data being stored in the server 2008 r2 system on an LSI RAID card with BBU.

To acomplish this, I need to be able to point the WHS shares to network shares or libraries. I've been messing with this for a few days and having zero luck. I was curious if anyone here has done anything like this (Sort of the salmon going upstream for data lol) or have any thoughts on the topic. I can't be the only one out there that doesn't like to have precious data sitting in a virtual image (even RAID VDs can essentially be thought of as one giant physical disk as far as OSs are concerned).

Thanks guys for any feedback!
Austin

 

[pjkenned]

May have misread but it seems pretty easy:

Create Big LSI RAID 6 array
Run 2008 R2 w/ Hyper-V role
Pass-through big LSI RAID volume
WHS 2011 (running in Hyper-V GM) GPT the LSI volume and uses that as the share

Did I miss something?

 

[Nutter281]

If I pass through the LSI RAID volume and add it as GPT, the files stored on that LSI RAID will still be written in that pseudo - virtual disk format (where WHS installs it's own partitioning file system) and render those files unreadable (at a physical level) by other OS correct?

To make example simpler, if I have a server with one OS HDD of arbitrary volume and one storage HDD, say a single disk 2TB drive. As I fill the single 2TB drive with data, the OS drive can crash, can be swapped to a different OS, I can move that 2TB drive to another system, etc. and any system where that drive is present can read the data stored on that drive. This is not the case for a storage drive that was controlled by WHS Vail. If I plug that 2TB drive into a WHS Vail system, it will reformat that drive, apply it's own file system on top of it, and include it in the storage pool. Then if I pull that 2TB drive out and stick it into another system, that system will only see the WHS system files and not any of the 'raw' data (i.e. it won't see jpegs and MP4s because they are pseudo virtual image)

Unless this changed when they removed DE or these rules don't apply when adding a GPT disk?

edit:
I'm also unfamiliar with how passthrough works in hyper-v. If I pass through the volume, is it being passed in as a virtual disk image (.vdi or similar) or does it pass the physical drive through (i.e. if it were a single 2TB drive containing some jpegs and MP4s, when passed through to the hyper-v VM it would see that physical drive with the jpegs and MP4s)?



Thanks so much for the help,
Austin

 

[S-F]

I'mm not sure about WHS 2011 partitioning new drives but I know that the new FS they were using before is now defunct so you can still read the data from your hypothetical array in a different OS.

 

[pjkenned]

You could actually read the WHS V1 drives on other PCs if you wanted to recover data or something in WHS.

Also of interest to you may be the Hyper-V disk pass-through quick guide.

It passes the entire disk/ RAID volume through to the Hyper-V VM. If you pass a new unformatted disk in, the guest OS sees a new unformatted disk and the Hypervisor sees an "offline" disk and more or less lets it be.

 

[Nutter281]

Hi Guys,

Thanks so much for the help! I guess I hadn't mess with Vail since last year before the DE was removed. Hyper-V HDD passthrough actually seems extremely ideal for a VM (props MSFT).

Anywho, that is now working, the only remaining question I have is how to get pictures stored on my LSI RAID to show up in the Remote Access Media Library (used for slide shows or media streaming with silverlight)? I've tried relocating my pictures/videos/music shares to the LSI RAID, but when I access the remote website it is still showing 0 songs, 0 videos, 0 pictures, etc.

Any thoughts?

Thanks again everyone,
Austin