Windows Home Server V2 (Vail).

[Silent_Buddha]

WHS v2 is going to be 64 bit only.

http://mswhs.com/2010/04/26/windows-home-server-v2-vail-part-1/

While it's a very specialized operating system with a narrow design focus, it's still nice to see that at least one of MS' OSes will be 64 bit only.

Hopefully, that'll speed up the move to 64 bit only OS in the future, if only by a little.

Also, interesting read on the new hardware abstraction layer for HDDs in Vail.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3677/windows-home-server-v2-vail-beta-drive-extender-v2-dissected

One thing to note, the Anandtech article isn't quite right. There isn't a hard limit to the amount of drives. But there is a bug with the new system if you have greater than 16 drivers or greater than 16 TB of data. Thus the guidance of limiting your system to 10 drives for the BETA. The WHS team are hoping to fix the bug before it's set to RTM.

I love the current implementation in WHS, even with the caveates of situations where it isn't appropriate. And the situations where you have to wait before being able to do something with a file.

Vail appears set to remove those few limitations. And could be a stepping stone towards a revamped system for future versions of Windows.

I'd love to see a WHS style drive pool seemlessly integrated into regular Windows. Since using WHS, I haven't even glanced at RAID (which I only use for data redundancy). File duplication by folder without having to set an arbitrary size (Raid 1 for example) is very nice.

Likewise, having a storage pool that automatically spans across multiple drives and can automatically include added drives or automatically adjust to removed drives is nice.

Regards,
SB

 

[Malo]

Nice! I've been waiting for this to build a home server.

Of note from part 2:

Q) Why is Vail 64bit only?

A) Microsoft have been heavily pushing 64bit since Vista, I know Windows 8 due for release in 2012 is going to be 64bit only and possibly offered in 128bit form. I personally think that moving to 64bit only is a good thing, I understand those of you who have recently bought new hardware will be peeved and I do empathise with them, but the benefits of 64bit are plain to see and moving from 32bit for some was never going to be pain free.

Yes!

 

[willardjuice]

128-bit form? lol

 

[dkanter]

The point of using 128b addressing is treating all storage (disk and memory) as a single address space.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_i

DK

 

[BRiT]

This looks to be nice, very nice.

Now if only they'd add an unRAID filesystem to the mix instead of being limited to RAID-1, it would rock. Think of it as Raid-4 without striping of the data, but includes a parity protection. As an added benefit, if more than 1 drive fails in the raid set, your data on the other drives are still there. In other traditional raid setups, you loose all your data. It also allows for spinning down of unused drives, where other raid systems keep ALL drives spinning. [ http://www.lime-technology.com/technology | http://www.networkcomputing.com/servers-storage/unraid-but-not-unprotected.php ]

Like a RAID-4 array, an unRAID is made up of a group of data drives and a dedicated parity drive. Rather than stripe data across the data drives as a RAID-4 array would, unRAID writes an independent RFS file system to each data drive. When you save a file to the system, it's stored in one data disk's file system. unRAID updates the corresponding blocks on the parity disk to reflect the new data. As long as the parity disk is as large as or larger than all the other drives, unRAID can use all the space on all its data drives for user files.

To minimize the number of I/Os for each write, unRAID calculates the new parity from the old parity, the new data and the old data, so the parity calculation takes four I/Os for any set of data drives. Calculating parity from all the data drives could take several times that many on a large array. It also means an unRAID system only needs to spin up one data drive to play a movie and just two, the data drive that's being written to and the parity drive, to store data.

 

[Bludd]

I guess it will still use WOW64?

 

[Valzic]

Finally downloaded the beta.

Will make a virtual server on my Server 2008 R2 to test out. I have separate machine running the original (absolutely think WHS is the best thing) When it comes out RTM... I been mulling over running it this way anyways (virtual) and this old Q6600 with 8GB of memory was targeted for that when I upgraded my system.

I am 100% sure they will never make use of any type of "official" raid system as they have had many discussions and explanations of why they are steering away from that type of hardware setup. They have targeted this at the home market ( and it looks like small Business market may get this too) and Simplicity is the catch phrase.

They are right too. My friend raided his own server and decided to use standard Server 2008 as his home backup. I have had much amusement over his recovery efforts when he had a problem and the time he spent setting it up was huge compared to the ease of WHS. (he does that for living at a Military base). I rather spend my time coding and using system and not even thinking about backup.

The previews of WHS2 look great- its what WHS should have been if Server 2008 had not been delayed and they had to use Server 2003 as base.

 

[BRiT]

Which is why I said they could use an unRAID-like system. It has no hardware requirements other than having HDDs. It also has none of the typical RAID recovery issues.

On WHS V2, you're going to start experiencing the typical RAID recovery issues when you have failed drives because of how they placed their pooled-storage level BELOW the filesystem level. The real test will come when your pooled storage has -2- drive failures on a 4+ drive system. With the way the previews of their changes were presented, it seems like you'll be forced to replace the 2 failed drives before you can even begin looking at what content, if any, remains within that storage pool.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Which is why I said they could use an unRAID-like system. It has no hardware requirements other than having HDDs. It also has none of the typical RAID recovery issues.

On WHS V2, you're going to start experiencing the typical RAID recovery issues when you have failed drives because of how they placed their pooled-storage level BELOW the filesystem level. The real test will come when your pooled storage has -2- drive failures on a 4+ drive system. With the way the previews of their changes were presented, it seems like you'll be forced to replace the 2 failed drives before you can even begin looking at what content, if any, remains within that storage pool.

This is only true if a single file cannot fit entirely on one single drive. Otherwise the underlying Drive Extender 2 will attempt to keep contiguous files entirely on one drive. NTFS won't see any of that, of course. I wonder if this is part of the problems they are running into with greater than 16 drives/16 TB in a storage pool.

It's a very elegant system with built in data redundancy (if enabled at the folder level on a system with at least 2 data drives) without wasting HD space on a parity disk. And with the convenience of not wasting space on data duplication if such isn't needed.

Customers who have data files greater than 1 TB that require spanning over multiple drives however might want to look into a different file system. Then again customers that have single files spanning greater than 1 TB aren't the target of WHS (Home and to an extent Home Office). For those customers, they really should be looking at Server 2008 instead with a storage system tailored to their needs.

Regards,
SB

 

[BRiT]

Given the diagrams they show they either overly simplify things or they implemented them rather naively. I doubt they'd do the naive impl.

Thinking a bit more about how I'd do this, I think they're having a 'virtual' NTFS filesystem, one which is constructed on-the-fly from information stored on each individual disk. They don't have a physically stored NTFS File Table on the drives. It's likely done similar to unRAID's user-share filesystem or Linux's unionFS and multi-hddFS (mhddfs).

As for the drive space wasting, it can be significantly more than a single parity drive depending on the amount of data you want to be protected. If all of your content is to be protected, in all cases WHS suffers from 50% disk waste. In cases of more than 2 drives, that's significantly greater than the 1/n waste that a Parity disk uses.

Even for serving up multimedia such as movies, tv-shows, or music, any sane person should want that media protected. After having a hard drive failure wipe out most of my multimedia, I've learned to value my time more than wasting -1- drive to have Parity protection. It takes a surprisingly long time to re-rip all of my DVDs, HD-DVDs, BluRays, and CDs. I value that time at greater than the $130 a 2TB HDD costs. Other consumers might not value their time as such, but until they lose data they won't know exactly how precious their time and efforts really are.

Now why wouldn't any sane person want their data to be protected? The only data I can see not wanting to be protected are external backups, which by definition should be stored offline and offsite anyways.

 

[Richard]

I was really hoping the Media Centre integration rumours were true. Alas, without that a WHS wouldn't replace any of my current boxes/equipment so I'd rather not have yet another thing sucking on power.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Even for serving up multimedia such as movies, tv-shows, or music, any sane person should want that media protected. After having a hard drive failure wipe out most of my multimedia, I've learned to value my time more than wasting -1- drive to have Parity protection. It takes a surprisingly long time to re-rip all of my DVDs, HD-DVDs, BluRays, and CDs. I value that time at greater than the $130 a 2TB HDD costs. Other consumers might not value their time as such, but until they lose data they won't know exactly how precious their time and efforts really are.

Now why wouldn't any sane person want their data to be protected? The only data I can see not wanting to be protected are external backups, which by definition should be stored offline and offsite anyways.

Anything that actually is somewhat important I wouldn't trust to just a parity drive and reconstruction anyways. It's far from bulletproof or reliable. Granted data duplication isn't bulletproof either, but it's far safer than reconstruction from a parity drive. And as noted, anything of critical importance (family photos/movies) should also have an offsite backup. Bank safety deposit box in my case.

I'll grant you that a parity system will grant more space with some form of data loss protection for all files, but I prefer a more solid protection for important files and for the rest, I'm not particularly concerned if my temporary files bit the dust.

Then again, that's why everyone has a choice of what RAID implementation they want.

As to the Drive Extender v2 implementation. Anandtech mentioned it was similar to, but less feature rich than, Linux's ZFS. I stopped caring about Linux about 8 years ago, so I'm not sure exactly what that entails. And then NTFS is just layerd on top of that.

I was really hoping the Media Centre integration rumours were true. Alas, without that a WHS wouldn't replace any of my current boxes/equipment so I'd rather not have yet another thing sucking on power.

My media portal/server box is also my WHS box (hooked directly to the living room TV). It works quite well actually, although initial setup of WHS for those purposes is a bit of a pain (similar to taking Server 2003 and turning into a desktop OS). But with the aging XP codebase, it's getting a bit more difficult as time goes on. WHS v2 being based on Server 2008/Vista should be much easier.

Regards,
SB

 

[Malo]

So, with PP3 giving us library support and full backups for windows 7, as well as proper media center integration with windows 7, is there any reason still for me to wait for WHS2? Also they've removed drive extender with WHS2, only supporting hardware RAID done by OEM.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yah, with the removal of Drive Extender, I'm not quite sure if I'll be getting Vail anymore. At this point it's far more likely that I'll stick with WHS 1. Nothing beats the convenience of being able to add any size disk at anytime to the drive pool with Mirrored redundancy on a folder by folder basis.

Regards,
SB

 

[MfA]

Also they've removed drive extender with WHS2, only supporting hardware RAID done by OEM.

Why is Microsoft just so much fail nowadays? I hope they are smart enough not to certify RAID5 for WHS2 use or people will rightly blame Microsoft for the inevitable disasters which will follow.

Hmmm ... Microsoft seems to think the hardware manufacturers of the servers are their customers and not the users ... why do they want to be beholden to the middle man? WHS is a strong brand, they could have gotten boxes made even without cowtow'ing to the IHVs which are just interested in putting people on an expensive hardware upgrade cycle. Conspiracy theory time, Microsoft is licensing WHS to hardware manufacturers with a contract giving them a percentage of revenue from storage upgrade modules?

One of the comment posts from the WHS developer blog which sums what I think Microsoft is doing :

To use the "We Got Served discount" that DROBO gives to WHS users, yesterday I finally ordered my first DROBO device. I chose a DROBO S that has 5 drive bays and eSATA, FW800 and USB 3.0 interfaces. I'm going to connect it to my now unused 3 years MacBook and put it on the network after copying all my WHS content on it. Bought 4x GreenCaviar 2TB drives to use with a free 1.5TB disk that is on the WHS.

I still believe that what MS really wanted was to kill WHS. Congratulations. They succeeded. In doing so MS pointed me into what will be a 100% Apple infrastructure at home. With the end of WHS that was my last Microsoft product (although one that I really loved), MS ends its life in my house.

A lot of small mistakes made consistently over time will be Microsoft doom. This is just one of them.

They are slowly killing every distinguishing feature of Windows for the consumer and replacing them with features much more easily replaced entirely by the competition (PC gaming vs. XBOX, DE vs. RAID). I'm sure they will find some way to make that profitable short term, but long term Microsoft is doomed at the moment.

 

[Malo]

Yeah I think I'll just go ahead and start building my WHS1 box now. With the WD Align at least my two WD20EARS drives will work fine and I can finally move all the family's data and media to a server. Don't want just a NAS, want the full package with media center so Drobo or similar aren't an option for me. There's even WHS addons for PS3 media server.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

Yep sticking with V1 myself too. I don't understand this decision... DE is basically *the reason* to get WHS. With it removed they're offering nothing of use that a standard Windows PC doesn't do already.

 

[BRiT]

They weren't able to get the new updated system to actually function without issue. When pressed for time, they were left with the choice of either delaying the entire product stack (other server OSes) or removing the failed subsystem and hitting the deadlines. They opted to hit their time lines.

How it ever got beyond the proof of concept stages in an experimental offshoot development branch of the product is beyond me. It was a total rework of the function which would operate at an entirely different level. They grossly oversimplified their known issues or underestimated the development time required.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

They weren't able to get the new updated system to actually function without issue. When pressed for time, they were left with the choice of either delaying the entire product stack (other server OSes) or removing the failed subsystem and hitting the deadlines. They opted to hit their time lines.

Yup I understand the situation, but it basically makes it useless IMHO. That's like saying "we could either delay releasing Windows to make the graphical output work or just release it with only command-line support". You can't sacrifice your core feature for time reasons

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yup, it's one of the reasons I'm thinking about picking up 4 or 5 copies of WHS v1 around when WHS v2 launches. I'm hoping the copies get discounted at that time.

Regards,
SB