Windows Home Server Code Name "Vail" public preview announced

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Archer75

Supreme [H]ardness
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yeah....hopefully this means < 6 months for RC/release. Amazing amount of little annoyances that they finally fixed. I'm really happy with what they did. It was like they actually listened to our complaints and said "alright, lets do this"

EDIT: oh crap, I guess they did some bad things too...10 drive limit and non-NTFS format on drives :(
 
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10 drive limit is not a hard limit but a recommendation for this beta

You can do 32 drives currently with V1.....maybe the Premium version will allow for more drives.
 
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I'm putting this in a VM (odd VPN workings today... have to connect to the WHS to RDC into my main PC to then RDC into the Win2k8R2 server... talk about input lag!) today and I will see what I can do with it.
 
unfortunately i wont get to play with this until next week, damn i am swamped :(
 
Too bad about the drive and pool limitation issues mentioned. I had been waiting for this next major build to revisit WHS v2 since the previous beta was so unfinished and "under construction". I hope the final RTM version isn't this much of a toy.
 
If this thing ever finishes downloading (83% but I have to "resume" every 1-2% on the microsoft downloader) I'll work on that one.
 
Whoa, I read a Vail preview/review that stated disks are not readable anymore when they're taken from the WHS system and plugged into any regular Windows rig... What/how are they formatted in then? Is that true or was the reviewer just off his rocker? Seems like they're throwing the baby out w/the bathwater there, this was one of the more convenient features of WHS if you ask me...
 
This will Erase ALL DATA on your system!!!

For those of you with headless systems, this should help out.

  1. Just make a USB installer with the win7 download tool and your WHS ISO.
  2. Then make a cfg.ini file in the root of the new usb drive with the following

    Code: 
    [WinPE]
InstallSKU=SERVERHOMEPREMIUM
ConfigDisk=1
CheckReqs=0
SystemPartitionSize=60
[InitialConfiguration]
Language=en-US
Locale=0409
Country=US
KeyboardLayout=00000409
AcceptEula=true
ServerName=VailPremServer
PlainTextPassword=Str0ngPa$$w0rd
PasswordHint=This Is Your Password Hint
Settings=All

NOTES
Items in ( ) are just notes do NOT add them to the file

[WinPE]
InstallSKU=SERVERHOMEPREMIUM (dont change)
ConfigDisk=1 (dont change)
CheckReqs=0 ( “0&#8243; means that it will not check against the requirements to install)
SystemPartitionSize=60 (must be at least 20) (must have 120gb or larger HDD to install)
[InitialConfiguration]
Language=en-US (dont change unless you know these values)
Locale=0409 (dont change unless you know these values)
Country=US (dont change unless you know these values)
KeyboardLayout=00000409 (dont change unless you know these values)
AcceptEula=true (dont change)
ServerName=<Enter your new server name here>
PlainTextPassword= <Password for your new server, (must contain at least 3 of the 4: uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and symbols)>
PasswordHint=<This Is Your Password Hint (required)>
Settings=All (dont change)
 
BTW anyone wanting to actually beta test and submit bugs to MS connect, dont forget to install the Log Collector.

Its a small app that when you encounter a bug will automatically send info to MS and will provide you a CAB #.
Then go to connect and submit your bug. On this form there is a required field for the CAB #.
 
Very interesting. Love how they are adding a previous versions tab for the volume shadow copy. I can't tell you how many times this feature has allowed me to not have to go to a tape to restore a file at a clients.
 
pjkenned said:
Working on this. I found some cool stuff already.
Click to expand...

Yes there are some sweet features

Ones that have caught my attention.

  1. Server OS and System State Backup
  2. Remove System drive from Data Pool
  3. Improved remote access options
  4. Remote Media Streaming (killer!!)
  5. Mobile site
  6. Homegroups
 
pjkenned said:
Looks like it works in Hyper-V and has integration services included. Connector software limit is 15 client PC's (up from 10 I think), and...

Release date: Holiday 2010 from the looks of it! http://www.servethehome.com/windows-home-server-whs-v2-vail-installed-hyperv-early-release-clue/
Click to expand...

Yea its fully Server 2008 R2 codebase, with added software for the HS part.

I think 15 users will only be for the premium version.
I bet basic will get 5 or 10.

it will really interesting to see the differences in the versions when the RC comes out.
 
swatbat said:
Very interesting. Love how they are adding a previous versions tab for the volume shadow copy. I can't tell you how many times this feature has allowed me to not have to go to a tape to restore a file at a clients.
Click to expand...

Nice i missed that.

That will come in handy :)
 
nitrobass24 said:
Nice i missed that.

That will come in handy :)
Click to expand...

Took me a while to teach some of the complete idiots at various places how to do it and I get phones calls from time to time asking. Still it takes a few seconds to explain how to do it vs me pulling out my notebook and remoting in on top of having someone pull a tape for me(or driving to the clients).

Shadow copy is one of my favorite features. Too see home server getting what amounts to the business version is fantastic.
 
Important
Before you install Windows Server &#8220;Vail&#8221;, set your BIOS clock to match the time and date for the Pacific Time Zone (PST) regardless of where you are located in the world. After successfully installing Windows Server &#8220;Vail&#8221; and joining client computers, do not reset the time, date, and time zone on the Dashboard for another day.
If you do not set your server time to PST, you should not use the server or connect computers to it until the number of hours pass that equals the difference between your time and PST.
Click to expand...

This only applies to this release and will not be an issue in the final version.
 
Migrating a Data Pool from a Vail server to another Vail server works.

You can take *all* hard drives from one Vail server (or all minus one if all volumes are duplicated) and connect it to a different Vail server *that has no storage of its own* (that is, only the system volume is present). The target Vail server will recognize that a foreign disk set (aka 'non-default server storage') is connected. At this time the user will be able to promote the foreign disk set to become the default disk set for the target Vail server. Promoting to default does not format disks; it retains all data, establishes the association with the server, fixes all SMB shares etc.
Click to expand...

Im liking WHS v2 more and more
 
Some Information on DEv2

Drive Extender v2 is a volume driver that sits *under* the file system. In other words, on a running Vail machine Drive Extender presents its data as regular NTFS volumes (each share, e.g. Music, Videos, etc. is a separate volume with its own drive letter), and all applications that live on top of NTFS and interact with NTFS through the documented interfaces should work just fine. In fact, application compatibility has *dramatically* improved compared to WHS v1, and making sure that we look just like regular NTFS volumes to applications (both local and remote) was one of our primary design goals for v2.

Internally, these NTFS volumes are sliced and diced into 1 GB chunks, which are distributed (in multiple copies if duplication is enabled) across multiple physical disks according to our own on-disk schema. DEVolume.sys (our driver, working only on Vail at the moment) is the only driver currently in existence that can parse this layout and present the aforementioned NTFS volumes to applications. Consequently, any system not running DEVolume.sys is currently unable to retrieve the data from directly connected DEv2 disks -- that includes all client Windows OS. This affects only situations when DEVolume.sys is not loaded / running -- primarily recovery scenarios, as mentioned in the original post.
Click to expand...
 
It appears the 10 disk limit is due to instability in the beta code for drive extender and should be removed for release.
 
One thing I noticed is duplication is on by default on all the shares, I don't remember it being on in WHS, but it's been while since I did the install of the original.
 
The new data format and inability to read disks on other pc's is a major limitation. At the very least they need to release a simple app that includes DeVolume.sys and can be used to read the disks on any OS. Even better would be formatting each WHS storage disk so that it has an extra 50MB partition. This partition would contain DEVolume.sys, so that when you pop the disk into another pc, it would be able to read that. And of course the driver should be part of Windows in a hotfix.
 
The way I read it is that the data is spread over all of the disks so just being able to read one doesn't buy you anything. You'd have to connect all the disks to another PC to be able to read the data (if the PC had the DeVolume.sys driver).
 
danman said:
The way I read it is that the data is spread over all of the disks so just being able to read one doesn't buy you anything. You'd have to connect all the disks to another PC to be able to read the data (if the PC had the DeVolume.sys driver).
Click to expand...

No the data is not striped. its just spread out, just like it is now.

Right now in WHS v1 if you pull a drive and you have a Videos Folder on there. That doenst mean you will have all of your "Video" files on that drive.
Some of them may be on another drive as well.
 
nitrobass24 said:
No the data is not striped. its just spread out, just like it is now.

Right now in WHS v1 if you pull a drive and you have a Videos Folder on there. That doenst mean you will have all of your "Video" files on that drive.
Some of them may be on another drive as well.
Click to expand...

Actually, this is what Bulat Shelepov, Test Lead (Drive Extender), Windows Home and Small Business Server Team had to say on the MS forums about the issue.
Drive Extender in Vail is block-based, not file-based. Which means a) that separate replicas of a file are not individually accessible by a user (which was the case in v1) and b) that even a single replica of a file can be physically located on multiple drives (like on a striped RAID array).

This, by the way, fixes a notorious v1 issue. There was a guy who backed up his clients into a single 400 GB file, and copied the file to a v1 home server. Now, he had 1 TB of free space, but it was distributed across four drives (250 GB on each), and he couldn't copy the file because free space on each drive wasn't large enough to accomodate the file (which was necessary for file-based Drive Extender v1). Now, in Vail, it would work just fine since a single file can span multiple physical disks.
Click to expand...


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Well then.....if thats the case arent you going to be royally fucked if your drive dies and you dont have duplication?
 
Yea... but at this point... should just have a good raid 6 implementation. All of the reasons for using DE in the first instance are gone now. At this point it is probably closer to raid 0 + 1 (from DE).
 
EnderW said:
sounds like you'd be fucked even with duplication if you lose more than 1 drive
Click to expand...

You would, but to be fair, most systems (including WHS v1 and various levels of RAID for that matter) aren't really equipped to handle 2 particular drives failing at the same time. Depending on how much it's RAID 0'd, you might not lose as much data with the WHS v1 method, though.

I do like some of the features, but I'm kind of disappointed by the whole striping business, which leads to the non-NTFS compatibility. Their reasoning is that it's easier to store big files with the striping but I'm not affected by this downside in WHS v1.

The 10 drive limit doesn't seem like that big a deal since it looks like it's just a beta limitation.
 
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Yeah, 10 drive limit is just a perf issue now. It will be removed in RTM.
 
One thing that is semi-good about WHS DE is the fact that you basically get a hotspare functionality. In raid 5 you can still access data in a degraded array, but it doesn't migrate down to a smaller array to heal itself, you instead need a hotspare. DE can move data among the available storage pool. In theory 1800GB (a 2TB drive) / 100MB/s would be fault tolerant again in 5 hours or less... assuming you had the free space.
 
Another nice thing is Vail does a ECC and the data on the drives. So corruption or bit rot shouldn't be an issue.

But they also said that drive extender is undergoing extensive changes and can change a great deal from one build to another.
Just post on the official forums, as you can see the microsoft team is responding and hearing our feedback.

You can also backup the backups and even backup the main system drive. So should the main drive die it should be quick and easy to restore it and be back up and running.

Here's a good explanation of the new drive extender:
Drive Extender is a storage technology first introduced in Windows Home Server's first release. The 1st generation of the technology was file based, and worked on top of "vanilla" NTFS volumes using reparse points. To address the customer feedback we have received and improve the system's resiliency to partial drive failures (seen many times by our support), the Drive Extender technology was updated to use block based storage below the file system similar to software RAID systems.
The following isn't an exhaustive list, but does try to enumerate the major new features as well as features which are no longer supported in the &#8220;Vail&#8221; version of Drive Extender:

Features carried over from the previous release:
· Duplication can be turned on/off per folder.
· Duplicated folders can survive a single hard drive failure.
· Storage pool can be easily expanded using different drive types and various sizes.
· Graphical representation of storage usage (AKA the pie chart) - isn't present in the beta, but is planned for the next milestone.

New/Improved features:
· For duplicated folders, data is duplicated in real time to two separate drives - there is no hourly migration pass.
· File system level encryption (EFS) and compression are now supported for Drive Extender folders.
· File conflicts are gone, duplication works as intended for files in use as it is performed at the block level now.
· The remaining amount of data to synchronize/duplicate is reported per storage pool.
· All storage operations are executed in the background without blocking other server operations. Specifically, drive removal can be issued without impacting the online state of shares.
· Drives in a storage pool can be named with a custom description to enable physical identification of the drive in the server.
· Drive serial number and exact connection type is reported for each drive.
· Drives which are bigger than 2TB can be added to a storage pool.
· iSCSI storage devices can be added to the a storage pool.
· The system drive can be excluded from the storage pool.
· A new low-level storage check and repair diagnostic operation was added.
· All storage operations are performed with very low I/O priority to ensure they don't interfere with media streaming.
· A new "folder repair" operation is available which runs chkdsk on the folder's volume.
· To protect against silent storage errors (bit flips, misdirected writes, torn writes), additional information is appended to each 512-byte sector stored on drive. In particular, each sector is protected by a CRC checksum, which enables Drive Extender to detect data read errors, perform realtime error correction and self-healing (up to 2 bit errors per sector if duplication is disabled, and any number of bit errors if duplication is enabled) and report the errors back to the user and application. The overhead for this additional data is roughly 12% of drive space.
· Data drives in storage pools can be migrated between servers, and appear as a non-default pool. A non-default pool can be promoted to a default pool if no default pool exists.
Deprecated features:
· A data drive from a storage pool cannot be read on machine not running the &#8220;Vail&#8221; server software.
· Data isn't rebalanced across drives to ensure even distribution. The data allocation attempts to keep drives evenly used. A periodic rebalance operation is considered for the next version.
Known interop/support issues:

· As with other software RAID solutions, Drive Extender isn't supported with BitLocker.
· Drive Extender cannot share the same drive with other software based RAID systems (such as Microsoft Dynamic Drives)
· Running low-level software storage tools&#8212;for example, defragmentation, full drive encryption, or volume imaging&#8212;on server folders may cause issues. These tools have not been fully tested in this release. Please avoid running these tools on the server.
· Internally, the &#8220;Vail&#8221; software has been tested with up to 16 hard drives and with up to 16 TB of total storage capacity. We&#8217;re aware of a number of bugs that occur beyond these limits, so please keep your beta installations under 16 drives and 16 TB total drive space.
 
So...by giving up NTFS we do gain other benefits. At least there is a trade that I can deal with. What it will mean to me is my external backup level may have to go up a notch. I can deal with that.
 
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