Well...This WON'T Work!

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• terça-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2007 12:29

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  This is a common issue that WHS beta testers have been having. I don't see any indication (in any of the WHS team blogs or other semi-official Microsoft communications) that it will be addressed in a way that will please those who want to repurpose existing production hardware, either.
  
  I think the answer to your questions is that yes, wanting to repurpose heavily loaded production hardware for WHS is a common enthusiast scenario. And no, we cannot presently have a choice in how we want WHS to manage our data, at least not the choice you're looking for.
  
  It's possible to hang your RAID array off of WHS as an unmanaged disk. The problem with that is that unmanaged disks are not available to WHS for serving files, or for backups. The only places you would see the array are if you logged in to the WHS desktop, where it would appear as a drive letter, and in the Server Storage tab of the console tool on your home PCs, where it would offer you the opportunity to add it to the storage pool.
  
  To get your data onto WHS in a way the WHS can manage, I think you would have to buy and install an additional (non-RAID) disk, then go through several rounds of "move some content, shrink the array, add the removed disk to the WHS storage pool." At the end of the day (well, couple of weeks; 2.5 TB is a lot of data), you would have an additional terabyte of storage, but you would have given up the RAID array and it's data protection.
  
  I hope some of this helps.
  
   
• terça-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2007 14:50

   

   
  

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  Yup, there have been a lot of people that have data that we'd like to convert in-place and add but it doesn't seem to be possible. I've been going through the exact same exercise and I'm ready to give up. I don't have enough physical disk space to make it work and I don't need the extra disk space that I would need to do the transfer. I thought about renting some space from an ISP but it would take a month to upload and it begs the question of why I'd need a home server if I have all of my content sitting on a managed server somewhere else.
  
   
• terça-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2007 15:37

   

   
  

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  DannoCron wrote:

  Currently, I am running Windows Server 2003 (evaluation copy).

  With all due respect, isn't the W2K3 evaluation copy on a 180-Day license that's going to expire?

  It's sounds like you're running all of your home production data on a server that isn't going to be around forever.  If you are planning on moving to a full license of W2K3 or in this case, WHS, I'd suggest you start planning what that move is going to look like.  One solution that I can think of is start breaking out your RAID array into a JBOD and really squeeze all the space you can out of each 500GB drive and that 300GB boot drive.  Move files around, hell - delete some DVD's that you can re-rip at a later time.  It may take you a while, but you should be able to free up at least (1) 500GB drive. Set that up in WHS and start moving data, wittling down your RAID, moving disk, rinse, repeat, etc.  I don't have all the details on your setup, so that may not be viable - but if you are on a 180-Day eval, the clock is ticking ....

  - Jim

   
• terça-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2007 16:30

   

   
  

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  Thank you for all of the replies.

  The reason for the use of Windows 2003 Server (Eval copy) is that XP will not recognize a drive over two terrabytes and I really wanted to have the raid five setup for the "safety" features (I know there are no guarentees). And, yes I know the clock is ticking, but 2003 server is a "stopgap" until something better comes along. It seemed that Windows Home Server WAS the answer!

  At this time, I am looking to see whether or not Vista will support the raid drive larger than 2 terrabytes. If it does, then that will be the solution...not Home Server. If Vista doesn't support it, then the solution is a Linux Server setup (which I would prefer not to do since it is MUCH more difficult to set up and administer).

  Home Server, if allowed an option like I need, would be the BEST option!

   
• terça-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2007 16:33

   

   
  

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  DannoCron wrote:

  Thank you for all of the replies. The reason for the use of Windows 2003 Server (Eval copy) is that XP will not recognize a drive over two terrabytes and I really wanted to have the raid five setup for the "safety" features (I know there are no guarentees). And, yes I know the clock is ticking, but 2003 server is a "stopgap" until something better comes along. It seemed that Windows Home Server WAS the answer! At this time, I am looking to see whether or not Vista will support the raid drive larger than 2 terrabytes. If it does, then that will be the solution...not Home Server. If Vista doesn't support it, then the solution is a Linux Server setup (which I would prefer not to do since it is MUCH more difficult to set up and administer). Home Server, if allowed an option like I need, would be the BEST option!

  Vista supports a partition larger than 2TB, but setting up RAID 5 is sometimes a little frustrating. But yes, once setup, it can certainly support larger than 2TB partitions.

   
• terça-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2007 19:44

   

   
  

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  *Edit* - copied into new post... I hate this threaded response, as folks would have to know to re-read all of the old posts to find the most recent.
   
• terça-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2007 19:47

   

   
  

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  JayHeavner wrote:

  Yup, there have been a lot of people that have data that we'd like to convert in-place and add but it doesn't seem to be possible. I've been going through the exact same exercise and I'm ready to give up.

  I'm just guessing, but I'd say this is the #1pain point for the "heavy-duty" beta testers right now, especially if you end up experiencing problems with the home server, and have to do that data move 2 or 3 times, at 10+ hours per move.  It's EXTREMELY difficult to back up 2.5 terabytes of data, and a lot of these drive add/remove scenearios have resulted in data loss.

  Bottom line, as much as folks would like to use this in a "close-to-production" home environment now, I just don't think it's stable enough, at least if you're one of those multi-terabyte users...

   
• terça-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2007 20:29

   

   
  

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  Ken Warren wrote:

  This is a common issue that WHS beta testers have been having. I don't see any indication (in any of the WHS team blogs or other semi-official Microsoft communications) that it will be addressed in a way that will please those who want to repurpose existing production hardware, either. It's possible to hang your RAID array off of WHS as an unmanaged disk. The problem with that is that unmanaged disks are not available to WHS for serving files, or for backups. The only places you would see the array are if you logged in to the WHS desktop, where it would appear as a drive letter, and in the Server Storage tab of the console tool on your home PCs, where it would offer you the opportunity to add it to the storage pool. .....

  Ken Warren wrote:

  You can add disks to the server without formatting them. If you want a disk that's not part of the pool, you just add it to the system, but never add it in WHS Console. It will be available to the OS, but not network users or backups. For that disk space to be usable in the storage pool (and therefore available to network users/backups), DE needs to manage it, and that apparently means a format.

  Ok, you say it is posible to add a drive to the system without adding it to the storage pool of in WHS console. It will get a drive letter inside WHS. Is it possible to share this drive at the network outside the storage pool?

  At the moment I have setup a Windows 2003 server as fileserver to host drives of the pc of my wife that has a broken mobo. She connects with portable to the fileserver to access her files and financial administration of the church. Until I buy my new system (probably after 22nd April) it will run in this state. After that she will get mine mobo together with the drives.

   

   
• terça-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2007 20:45

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  Joh14vers6 wrote:

  Ok, you say it is posible to add a drive to the system without adding it to the storage pool of in WHS console. It will get a drive letter inside WHS. Is it possible to share this drive at the network outside the storage pool?

  
  Yes, it's possible to share it. You will need to share the drive directly, not through the WHS interfaces, and you won't be able to manage the shares through the WHS interfaces. It's also possible that you will experience other problems with WHS as a result of this, because this is most certainly not a supported configuration. there are warnings in several places in the documentation that using normal Windows features to manage storage has a chance of breaking WHS. You could even experience data loss or corruption, because WHS is not ready for production use. I would urge you not to do this. Microsoft has said directly that we should not put irreplaceable data on our WHS systems, because A) it's beta software, and has bugs known and unknown, and B) they will not guarantee that we will be able to "upgrade in place" to the RTM version.
  
  All that said, your current solution is probably a much better one than using WHS for this purpose.