Windows Home Server V2 (Vail).

[Davros]

Forgive me since I know bugger all about servers, but the point of D.E is multiple hdd's appear as 1 big one - Yes ?

havent we had that capability for years ?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Well, yes and no.

The beauty of DE is that you can add and remove any size HDD at anytime without having to rebuild your RAID. You also don't have to worry about about data loss when removing an HDD from the pool. DE will automatically move files off the drive you plan on removing assuming you have enough space in the drive pool. Added to that is the ability to automatically enable Raid 1 (duplication) of data on a folder by folder basis. Thus having the benefits of Raid 1, without having to waste redundancy on files that don't require it. And still with the freedom to add HDDs of mismatched sizes.

DE is an absolute thing of beauty for a home storage server, IMO. Hell, if you go to forums where building WHS boxes is common, people are building 30-60 Terabyte storage servers. It's become very popular for small businesses as well as home installations.

One particularly interesting solution I saw was a 60 TB machine running Windows Server 2008 with 7 virtual machines for various tasks. One virtual machine was running WHS as a storage server using most of that 60 TB capacity which then served as the storage server not only for his network but as network storage for the other virtual machines.

Most people universally question why MS are removing arguably the best feature of WHS.

Regards,
SB

 

[BRiT]

Over on the unRAID forums, we've been getting an influx of users that are converting from WHS v1 to unRAID, since it offers the ability to work with different sized drives and grow or shrink the array arbitrarily and protect the data without as much wasted space of DE's RAID-1 mirroring. It's not as point-and-click friendly, but it's very extensible if you can tolerate and learn Linux.

I agree, DE is the most important feature draw of that product. I'm still shocked at their decision to release without it.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yeah, I just don't have the time required to learn Linux unless it's become as easy to install and use as Windows over the past few years. Last time I tried, it was just too much trouble for what I wanted to try to do.

Regards,
SB

 

[MfA]

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 you know ... just delaying Vail alone.

This just doesn't hold water, if they really decided to cut it because they wanted to ship all three at once when there is no possible benefit to that (there is practically no overlap in market or marketing) then they are complete and utter morons. Pure PHB reasoning.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I believe there was plans to include DE with the full server OS's also as MS has been losing full server OS sales to WHS due to DE and the fact that it could fulfill many small business server duties.

Regards,
SB