#1 STUNNA

I'm messing around with the Remote streaming option only the video portion which you access by logging into the WHS website in a browser then playing a video in the browser. It uses Silverlight to do the streaming which is the same thing Netflix uses for their Watch Instantly feature. It's ok, the quality seems like it could be better. It's definitely watchable but there's a loss in fidelity and it seems that there's an occasional frame droppage here or there, either that or the video is at 15fps instead of 24fps. There's an ever so slight stutter in the video occasionally, most people wouldn't notice but I do.

I'm not sure if this is caused by my hardware that my WHS runs on or what. My WHS CPU usage is only at about 40% while streaming and I'm not using all of my RAM so it doesn't seem like a hardware problem. It might just be a pre-release bug. FYI, I'm connecting to my WHS directly over gigabit so that isn't the problem either.

Another annoyance is that you can't fast forward or skip to a certain part in a film. As the film plays the player loads a few minutes ahead of itself, you can only skip as far forward as the player has already loaded. If the player hasn't loaded the scene yet you can't skip to it. Pretty lame.

OTOH I got the homegroup up and running and it works great, better than I expected. I didn't know that homegroup automatically makes an SMB share for its folders. For example I have my 300+ movies in a folder called movies which is in the Videos homegroup. Using Windows 7 I connect to the movies via homegroup but on OS X I connect via SMB and the address is smb://whs/videos/movies and I didn't have to make my own share, it was done for me. I very much appreciated this.

Homegroup is pretty sweet! I can search for a video from the start menu of my W7 machine and it automatically sends out a search request to my WHS machine and returns the results right in the start menu. I don't have to navigate in explorer to the WHS machine then do a search, it happens right in the start menu. Very nice!

svtmike

Tonight my son's computer developed a problem. He got a blue screen while playing a game, and the computer would only loop through an immediate blue screen while booting.

I quickly created a WHS restore CD, booted from it and it's restoring from the server right now. Holy crap that was easy. Without the WHS I'd be staring at hours of XP reloading time.

#1 STUNNA

WHS FTW!

#1 STUNNA

what was the problem with his PC? blue screens are almost always hardware related so you may have the problem again after doing a restore

svtmike

Yeah it's happened before. I think the disk is a little flaky or it overheats. The PC is a 5 year old Shuttle xPC (very small form factor) so it's almost time to replace it.

#1 STUNNA

Just replace the drive and you can easily do a restore to the new drive

#1 STUNNA

Whs will even expand or shrink the partition depending if the new drive is bigger or smaller than the original

Mizouse

meh

alex2364

So we found out why Vail has been delayed til next year. Microsoft has decided to pull Drive Extender from the new version. Pretty crappy decision this late into beta testing.

http://www.geeksmack.net/microsoft/m...me-server-vail

svtmike

One of the drives in my Home Server (one that had been in use for years already in my NAS) has been going offline about once a week, and it's showing an "End to End Error" in the SMART data, indicating possible problems with the cache on the drive. I'll be replacing it with a new 2TB drive this week. Looks like a painless enough process.

#1 STUNNA

Yup! I was meaning to post this. This fucking sucks ass! It might just kill WHS! basically MS was trying to extend this next gen drive extender technology which does data duplication and storage pool which eliminates drive letters to other Server OSes. Ends up there was a problem with server programs running on top of drive extender, they just wouldn't work right and there were data integrity issues. While there wasn't an issue with WHS and drive extender for it's uses there were issues for other uses. So since they're built on the same platform MS has yet again chosen backwards compatibility over new future technology.

yeah now WHS isn't as good. This won't effect to original version of WHS but going forward the Vail version won't have this technology. they'll be releasing another beta in the future that doesn't have this tech.

I'm pretty sad over this, not sure what I'm going to do about my data backup plan now. I guess I could get a drobo and add it to WHS since it has most of the features of drive extender.

Stapler

Damn. Every time I think of going back to my linux setup that is one of the features I don't want to let go.

alex2364

I'm wondering what Microsoft is going to use for data duplication for Vail. Are they going back to RAID type technology where a drive is mirrored 1:1?

#1 STUNNA

AFAIK there won't be data duplication, unless the user configures RAID. It's just back to plain ol windows with no built-in drive enhancement technologies.

#1 STUNNA

it's now not this easy thing to configure and maintain. You now have to configure a RAID controller and make sure you have identical drives, these were both things that you didn't haveto worry about with the drive extender technology. It handled the duplication stuff and there was nothing to worry about, it just worked.

Stapler

*jumps ship*

Though the MS search architecture has been fairly useful. Between pandora, netflix and windows live 2011 I really don't actually use any of the other features.

#1 STUNNA

IDK if I'll jump ship I might just add a Drobo and put all my drive in there.

alex2364

You can setup software RAID in Windows Server 2008, so I don't see why you can't do that in Vail. And you don't even need identical drives.

http://www.techotopia.com/index.php/...D_1%29_Volumes

hornyleprechaun

Stunna what version of WHS should I look into getting? I'm thinking of installing this on my HTPC.

alex2364

From a Microsoft blog post:
So they will be counting on people using hardware and software RAID.

svtmike

I'll just stick with WHS 1. It works great for what I want (backup management and data storage) and I don't need the transcoding stuff from Vail.

The Dougler

iTrader: (1)

I'm saddend by this. vail delayed till next year.

#1 STUNNA

Neowin is reporting it as if it's a good thing. MS is saying no one really needed it anymore since the size of drives have gotten so big. Not really, maybe we don't really need the drive pooling but data duplication is good. MS says they'll be working OEMs to get the data duplication front covered, probabl with RAID 1. But for us DIY guys we're on our own...

doopstr

I really don't feel like Drive Extender is a big deal.

Anyone that is going to setup a WHS on a white box knows how to setup RAID. Anyone else is going to buy a HP/Dell box with a built in RAID setup.

Did Drive Extender keep point in time backups? If not I don't see how this is much better than having something kick off robocopy every 15 minutes. Point in time could also be supported with robocopy and shadow copies.

#1 STUNNA

Drive extender allowed you to combine different branded drives of different sizes into drive one drive and it duplicated data amongst all the drives

You just set it up and forget it and you don't have to maintain it, this was great technology for the consumer market

doopstr

After reading through the MS Technote on how it works, I'm not surprised they canceled it

What are they so worried about

svtmike

I think it works great within the confines of the stock WHS functionality. Much more flexible and much easier to expand/contract than a RAID array. I can replace my failing 1TB drive with a 2TB drive and all I have to buy is the replacement drive.

CocheseUGA

I'll be grabbing a copy of the current version as soon as I find a good price.

#1 STUNNA

As expected there's been a strong backlash amongst WHS users and they want them to add this feature back. Hopefully MS will listen. I understand removing it from the other business oriented server OS's but not from WHS. I under stand that they all run on the same platform but maybe MS would be nice and branch WHS off from the others to keep DE. Problem with that is costs, having two platforms means double costs for maintenance and testing, etc.

you can voice your opinion on the connect page here:
https://connect.microsoft.com/Window...?wa=wsignin1.0

Rock2534

What is a decent price for this? Newegg has the oem version for $99, seems good?

CocheseUGA

That's about the price I've seen. If I could find OEM for about $70, I'd jump on it.

The Dougler

iTrader: (1)

Why not just make it an option in the OS. Default is off to satisfy server level customers, with the option to turn it on somewhere in control panel for the rest of us joe schmoes.

doopstr

I think it's fairly obvious to see that there is some problem with the technology and rather than push the release date back to 2025, they took it out.

This is not the first time MS removed some revolutionary storage feature. WinFS was supposed to ship with Windows Server 2003 and XP. It may make it into Windows 8.

#1 STUNNA

The problem isn't the technology it's getting business apps to run on it. And this technology isn't new, it's been in the original version of WHS and has worked just fine for years for those uses. There is not an issue with using DE on WHS, only with SBS. So they're striping the most important features out of WHS so that it doesn't effect users of SBS. They're sacrificing WHS for SBS.

For a little more reading

http://community.winsupersite.com/bl...23/120150.aspx
http://www.withinwindows.com/2010/11...users-product/

doopstr

If what your first link states is true then the community should be pissed that not only was it pulled, but MS has no intention of fixing the systems that are already deployed.

What disk tool problems? Why does it need to run chkdsk daily?

svtmike

My read of it is that it runs chkdsk daily so that you are warned about any data errors that develop on the disks before they turn into data loss. Going through the event log on my server doesn't reveal that chkdsk is finding any problems.

I got my drives all swapped out -- replaced two failing 1TB drives with two 2TB drives. All I had to do was install the new drives, add them to the storage pool, and then delete the failing drives one at a time. It took about 3 hours per drive for the server to transfer the data onto the new drives.

Now all I have to do is take the server down and remove the bad drives. Easy breezy lemon squeezy.

doopstr

I just read some more about this and I just realized that the Vail version is a complete re-write. So the Version 1 is not as broken as I thought .

#1 STUNNA

There wasn't any hard drive tools that worked with DE. So if there was a massive failure then it would be hard for the business to get their data back. I don't see why it would be impossible to make a drive tool that works with DE but because of it's niche status only in WHS no one had taken the time to make one yet. Not a deal breaker for home users but definitely is for business users.

#1 STUNNA

Well I've not given up hope of them keeping DE in Vail. There's been a huge backlash in the WHS community over this, everyone wants them to keep DE. The MS Connect feedback link I posted has over 3600+ people in favor of keeping DE with about 40 opposed.

The editor of www.wegotserved.com a WHS community and news page emailed steve ballmer about the situation and Steve replied that he's going to look into it. I have a good feeling that they're going to keep DE and maybe branch off WHS from the small business OSes.

http://www.wegotserved.com/2010/11/2...tender-fiasco/

doopstr

How often does Ballmer respond to customers via email? That's the first time I've seen that.