Sign in
Microsoft.com
 
Microsoft
 
 
 

locked
One big WHS or lots of small ones ? RRS feed

 > 

  • Question

  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

    Once all the drive bays in a WHS are full, which is the

    better course of action - keep adding more and more disks to the

    one central server instance via backplanes, external drive arrays etc

    or just have multiple WHS boxes on the network ?

    eg

    1 x backups WHS

    1 x movies A-D WHS

    1 x movies E-G WHS  

    etc

     

     

     

    Tuesday, May 29, 2007 7:27 PM

Answers

  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote
    You can have multiple computers running WHS on a network, but your home computers can only be associated with one server at a time. If you want to associate a home computer with another server, you need to reinstall the Connector software.
    Wednesday, May 30, 2007 4:24 PM

All replies

  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote
     Ian Hx wrote:

    Once all the drive bays in a WHS are full, which is the

    better course of action - keep adding more and more disks to the

    one central server instance via backplanes, external drive arrays etc

    or just have multiple WHS boxes on the network ?

    eg

    1 x backups WHS

    1 x movies A-D WHS

    1 x movies E-G WHS  

    etc

     

     

    Just keep adding more HDDs.

    Tuesday, May 29, 2007 8:29 PM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

    Plus wouldn't the replication feature help streamline in-place hard-drive upgrades?   aka - decomission a drive, pop in the biggest available, then let home server re-balance?

     

    Tuesday, May 29, 2007 11:22 PM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

     

    >> Plus wouldn't the replication feature help streamline in-place hard-drive upgrades?   aka - decomission a drive, pop in the biggest available, then let home server re-balance?

     

     

    Putting the original question in context, say someone wanted to store a moderately large DVD collection / recorded TV etc on a home server - could easily be talkng about 8 Terabytes BEFORE folder duplication switched on. Just got a vision of the resulting WHS server needing 5 extra controller cards and looking like an octopus with HDD cables sprouting out of the case and into several other cases holding the extra HDDs ! [ mmm... HP media smart server...   now if only we could daisy-chain a load of them together...]

     

    More seriously though, if there were 2 or 3 concurrent users all trying to stream video would the workload be better handled by multiple servers ?  [ assuming that the relevant data happened to be on different servers and they're all on a gigabit network that can handle the bandwidth ]

     

    Also concerned about the 'single point of failure' issue eg if the motherboard breaks -  yes we could do a re-installation onto new hardware, but will that take proportionately longer depending on the size of the storage pool ?

     

     

    Thanks

    Ian

     

    Wednesday, May 30, 2007 6:15 AM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

    I think the official line is only one WHS is supported per network, although some here have it working ok.

    If you wanted to go the seperate server route I'd question if you need WHS for the movie storage, something like freeNAS with RAID might be more suited (and cheaper). Whilst still using the (excellent) backup features of WHS to backup. I do realise that this is a little controversial in a Microsoft forum!

     

    Gordon

    Wednesday, May 30, 2007 2:16 PM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote
    You can have multiple computers running WHS on a network, but your home computers can only be associated with one server at a time. If you want to associate a home computer with another server, you need to reinstall the Connector software.
    Wednesday, May 30, 2007 4:24 PM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

     DocGuy wrote:
    You can have multiple computers running WHS on a network, but your home computers can only be associated with one server at a time. If you want to associate a home computer with another server, you need to reinstall the Connector software.

    I stand corrected  It's good to another member of the WHS team here, you didn't bring a copy of RC1 with you did you ?

     

    Gordon

    Wednesday, May 30, 2007 4:42 PM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

    >>  something like freeNAS with RAID might be more suited (and cheaper).

     

    The big draw with WHS is the storage pool and the ability to use dissimilar capacity

    drives. Maybe I'm out of touch with RAID, but if you use disk mirroring don't the drives

    have to be the same size ?

    Wednesday, May 30, 2007 6:53 PM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

     DocGuy wrote:
    You can have multiple computers running WHS on a network, but your home computers can only be associated with one server at a time. If you want to associate a home computer with another server, you need to reinstall the Connector software.

     

    .. but you could still map drives on the client desktop to the shared folders on the other (unassociated) servers, right ?

    (I was  under the impression that the "associated with" part was solely for the PC backup functionality, and

    that the Shared Folders was ordinary Windows networking)

    Wednesday, May 30, 2007 7:06 PM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote
    Correct, you can still connect to shared folders, as long as proper credentials are provided. And yes, the "association" is for backup and health reporting purposes.
    Wednesday, May 30, 2007 7:30 PM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote
     Ian Hx wrote:

     

    >> Plus wouldn't the replication feature help streamline in-place hard-drive upgrades?   aka - decomission a drive, pop in the biggest available, then let home server re-balance?

     

     

    Putting the original question in context, say someone wanted to store a moderately large DVD collection / recorded TV etc on a home server - could easily be talkng about 8 Terabytes BEFORE folder duplication switched on. Just got a vision of the resulting WHS server needing 5 extra controller cards and looking like an octopus with HDD cables sprouting out of the case and into several other cases holding the extra HDDs ! [ mmm... HP media smart server...   now if only we could daisy-chain a load of them together...]

     

    More seriously though, if there were 2 or 3 concurrent users all trying to stream video would the workload be better handled by multiple servers ?  [ assuming that the relevant data happened to be on different servers and they're all on a gigabit network that can handle the bandwidth ]

     

    Also concerned about the 'single point of failure' issue eg if the motherboard breaks -  yes we could do a re-installation onto new hardware, but will that take proportionately longer depending on the size of the storage pool ?

     

     

    Thanks

    Ian

     

    My WHS setup is currently at 2.5TB and will be 5TB in the next few days, and probably much more than that by the end of the year. My setup uses Sil 3124 based host adapters which offer 4 eSATA ports which can be combined with port multipliers to allows 20 drives per host controller. I have 3 of these controllers in my server right now.. Smile

     

    The server is in a rack mountable case, and the drive arrays are in their own rack mountable case with their own PSU FANS etc. The drive array case has 2 port multipliers in it connected to 10 drives internally. The drive array case connects to the server using only two eSATA cables. I think that's a fairly clean design, no "sprouting anywhere"..Smile

    Wednesday, May 30, 2007 8:36 PM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote
     kapone wrote:
    Ian Hx wrote:
    ......

    My WHS setup is currently at 2.5TB and will be 5TB in the next few days, and probably much more than that by the end of the year. My setup uses Sil 3124 based host adapters which offer 4 eSATA ports which can be combined with port multipliers to allows 20 drives per host controller. I have 3 of these controllers in my server right now..

    The server is in a rack mountable case, and the drive arrays are in their own rack mountable case with their own PSU FANS etc. The drive array case has 2 port multipliers in it connected to 10 drives internally. The drive array case connects to the server using only two eSATA cables. I think that's a fairly clean design, no "sprouting anywhere"..

    I dont see much Windows Home Server users having this kind of setup. It kicks *** but the majority of consumers dont have the resources nor knowledge to get something like this working.

     Ian Hx wrote:

    >> something like freeNAS with RAID might be more suited (and cheaper).

    The big draw with WHS is the storage pool and the ability to use dissimilar capacity

    drives. Maybe I'm out of touch with RAID, but if you use disk mirroring don't the drives

    have to be the same size ?

    If I remember correctly you can use disks of different sizes but it only use the size of the smallest disk. Would seem logical to cause you cant mirror a 80g drive on a 200g drive.

    On the topic at hand: i would replace the smallest disk with a bigger one. Storage is getting cheaper and cheaper and a new drive would not only offer more storage for a low price it would also do it a lower noise level and less power consumption (2 100g drives take up twice the space, make twice the noise and use twice the power than 1 200g drive).
    Thursday, May 31, 2007 9:58 AM
  • Question
    Sign in to vote
    0
    Sign in to vote

    'tis true the WHS way of adding disks is great, just depends on the cost of a copy of WHS when it is released to see if it's worth it.

     

    Gordon

    Thursday, May 31, 2007 11:22 AM