Windows Home Server For Storage Project

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flight16

n00b
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Oct 29, 2005
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For those who don't know what it is:
according to Wikipedia (with screenshots)
according to Ars Technica

I have a few external HDDs on firewire, but was looking to build something more reliable (redundancy for backups, single volume for large media). I almost decided on a NAS RAID, and probably would have gone with that if I didn't find WHS.

The biggest appeal for me about WHS is disk pooling, with redundancy (mirroring to different physical HDDs). You will get less space than RAID5 and the same number of disks, BUT... you can add oddly sized single disks and remove disks. Windows automatically reconfigures the disk pool, relocates mirrored files, etc. I would rather spend time using my storage pool and doing other things than being an admin and keeping it running.

My ideal setup would be a SFF running WHS connected to a tower of SATA HDDs (or whatever HDDs I hang on there via USB, Firewire, etc).

Anybody out there used WHS or have any thoughts?
 
I'd look into Solaris 10, as well. It has the same kind of support for adding odd-sized disks and doing mirroring (or even raid-Z, which is almost like raid 5 but better). It's also free. It does snapshots quickly, which means backups are easy. It's not terribly hard to install, and once it's installed setting up ZFS is a task I might be inclined to trust my grandmother with. Check out the ZFS Basics flash webcast thingy, and the ZFS Administration guide (pdf). I haven't set up Samba yet, but NFS serving is so easy it's remarkable.
 
unhappy_mage said:
I'd look into Solaris 10, as well. It has the same kind of support for adding odd-sized disks and doing mirroring (or even raid-Z, which is almost like raid 5 but better). It's also free. It does snapshots quickly, which means backups are easy. It's not terribly hard to install, and once it's installed setting up ZFS is a task I might be inclined to trust my grandmother with. Check out the ZFS Basics flash webcast thingy, and the ZFS Administration guide (pdf). I haven't set up Samba yet, but NFS serving is so easy it's remarkable.
Click to expand...

Sounds interesting. I'm anxious to test it out once parts for my new system get here. The progress they're making with MacFUSE is also hopeful. Running ZFS from a Mac Mini would be awesome.
 
Turning on Samba wasn't hard, either. I enabled SWAT, set up my configuration through a web browser frontend at $(myip):901, and then enabled samba.
Code: 
svcadm enable swat
<edit smb.conf>
svcadm enable samba
 
I don't use ZFS. Until they have a 'ufsdump' command for it that has the same functionality, I will never switch. Not even for RAID-Z.
 
Eickst said:
I don't use ZFS. Until they have a 'ufsdump' command for it that has the same functionality, I will never switch. Not even for RAID-Z.
Click to expand...

What do you use ufsdump for, specifically? There's 'zfs send/recieve' for backups, which you could even use for incremental backups with '-i'. You could write that output to a file or via ssh to another machine. Or you could just snapshot the whole filesystem and leave it online.
 
It seems ZFS is coming to OS X 10.5. It is actually in menus for 10.5 (though not yet enabled) and Sun has bugs in its ZFS bug tracker that mention spotlight.

I think I might hold off on building this file server until 10.5, then run a big tower of disks off of a Mac Mini via firewire. I know the bus for every one of those HDDs is going to pass through the same firewire port, but I already plan to get a Mini to connect to a TV and use for iTunes, VLC, Apache, etc. It would keep things as simple as possible (no second box for Solaris 10... but I really did want to try that out).
 
How important is the small form factor to you? I have similar plans that WHS seems to be perfect for. At this point I'm leaning toward building a cheap AM2 Sempron system. You can pretty much build an entire system for under $225 with a decent quality PSU and a really cheap case (and hence probably won't be anywhere near a shuttle form factor).
 
unhappy_mage said:
What do you use ufsdump for, specifically? There's 'zfs send/recieve' for backups, which you could even use for incremental backups with '-i'. You could write that output to a file or via ssh to another machine. Or you could just snapshot the whole filesystem and leave it online.
Click to expand...

zfs send has no where near the comprehensive functionality that ufsdump does. I use it for backing up to tape drive. zfs send might do what I need, but due to the fact that sun has said the output of that command might change in future releases, I'll be avoiding it.
 
unhappy_mage said:
I'd look into Solaris 10, as well. It has the same kind of support for adding odd-sized disks and doing mirroring (or even raid-Z, which is almost like raid 5 but better). It's also free. It does snapshots quickly, which means backups are easy. It's not terribly hard to install, and once it's installed setting up ZFS is a task I might be inclined to trust my grandmother with. Check out the ZFS Basics flash webcast thingy, and the ZFS Administration guide (pdf). I haven't set up Samba yet, but NFS serving is so easy it's remarkable.
Click to expand...
If you keep preaching that Solaris and ZFS stuff and you'll force me to play around with it!
 
drizzt81 said:
If you keep preaching that Solaris and ZFS stuff and you'll force me to play around with it!
Click to expand...

Preach! Force! Try, dammit! :D

In all seriousness, do try it. The things I've done so far have been remarkably simple, and if I had done them before it would have taken me a total of five seconds. When I added volumes to an existing pool, for example, most of my time was spent looking for the proper command to show the names for all the disks currently attached to the machine (it's 'format', by the way). After I found the names of the disks, I ran 'zpool add mypool c4d0 c4d1' (which ran for three or four seconds) and then df -h showed the increased capacity. As for speed, I haven't had a chance to test very conclusively. It's coming, though - expect a writeup of all this one of these days.
 
You should definitely play with Solaris. Experience with it is invaluable in the tech world. Some of the sysadmins I know can't even mount a cdrom in Unix let alone admin a box, but yet they still have jobs. One asked me one day what the command was for copying an entire directory structure.........
 
Eickst said:
One asked me one day what the command was for copying an entire directory structure.........
Click to expand...
How did he ever get hired? That's sad.

Oooska said:
How important is the small form factor to you? [...] You can pretty much build an entire system for under $225 with a decent quality PSU and a really cheap case (and hence probably won't be anywhere near a shuttle form factor).
Click to expand...
Form factor is rather important. My new apartment will probably be 270-320 square feet with the main room being 10'x10' or 15'x15'. So I want to keep things tiny and as quiet as possible. And sexy. No big ugly noisy boxes for me anymore.
 
It seems WHS is embedded only, and you can't just put it on any old PC ( souce ). Open Solaris 10 here we come.
 
This is/was sounding like an interesting option. What does 'embedded' actually mean in this context? Like the OS is on a chip only?
 
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