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A quick browse of Anandtech.com shows a nice dissection of WHS Drive Extender v2.

The review goes into changes from Drive Extender v1, the way NTFS and the storage pool interact, 1GB file chunks distributed across hard drives in a Raid 0 fashion, 2 bit ECC, application compatability, and even a comparison with ZFS.

See the story at Anandtech.com here.

Quick tip for those with headless systems that want to test Windows Server Codename VAIL (and that don’t have IPMI 2.0). To create a USB drive capable of a headless installation follow these two steps:

1. Make a USB installer with the win7 download tool and your WHS ISO.
2. Then make a cfg.ini file in the root of the new USB drive with the following code:

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If one browses this site they will quickly see that I am a fan of Hyper-V virtualization and also Windows Home Server. On April 26, 2010, Microsoft released the public preview of the long awaited Windows Home Server V2 codenamed VAIL. Of course, I did have a test system lying around, but the WHS V2 code base is supposed to be Windows Server 2008 R2 which is why it requires a 64-bit CPU. Now, I could have installed the VAIL preview onto a physical machine, but there are probably editors at 30 sites doing that right now. So how about something interesting, and more appropriate for software labeled beta and preview, a Hyper-V installation!

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As I am sure most of the Windows Home Server crowd has seen at this point, there is a WHS V2 Codename Vail preview posted on Microsoft’s website. Here is the download link to feature previews https://connect.microsoft.com/WindowsHomeServer/Downloads?wa=wsignin1.0 More information on the public beta and downloads can be found here: http://connect.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver

If anyone has used Windows Server 2008 R2, or somehow managed to try the early build of Vail through the public link, you will quickly see how this is going to be a nice upgrade from the Windows Home Server we enjoy today based on Windows Server 2003.

Now that the Big WHS is stable, and I have a bit more storage capacity than I need, I decided that Windows Home Server running virtualized in a Hyper-V virtual machine is good, but I wanted to test out some of the free WHS alternatives. A quck listing of the NAS operating systems installed on the current box shows is:

1. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 hosting, using Hyper-V:
2. Windows Home Server (My WHS VM)
3. FreeNAS
4. OpenFiler
5. unRaid
6. CentOS
7. EON
8. Ubuntu

A complete NAS: Hyper-V, WHS, Windows Server 2008 R2, CentOS, unRaid, Openfiler, Ubuntu, FreeNAS, EON all on one machine

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I had heard rumors of 32 drives being the limit, so I figured, why not? I had more than 32 1.5TB and 2TB disks in hot swap bays, and could easily handle the connectivity. Plus, since I am booting the new WHS from a VHD, I knew that WHS could mount VHD’s meaning I could somewhat quickly test 32+ disks with VHD’s and 32+ physical disks, and also virtualized and standard configurations. See the below picture for what this looks like:

Here are a bunch of VHD's in Hyper-V that were used for testing

Things have been progressing on the Big WHS front. First off, my main PC is now is using the WHS Connector software and has back-ups scheduled on the new WHS. The old WHS is still assembled, but it is not powered on at this point, just in case something goes wrong with the current setup. I also decided to play around with some other popular NAS/SAN solutions while I was at it.

Here’s a quick screen shot of the Windows Server 2008 R2 hosting Hyper-V virtual machines with Windows Home Server, OpenFiler, and FreeNAS:

Windows Server 2008 R2 with WHS, FreeNAS, and Openfiler in Virtual Machines

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Just as a note to anyone running multiple large disks in Raid 6 for Windows Home Server. I was setting up new Raid 6 arrays on the WHS this weekend, controlled by an Adaptec 31605 and was greeted by a nice error message. WHS is limited to four volumes per physical drive using basic discs. A quick search of the Adaptec site showed the problem and a proposed fix, dynamic disks. While this would be great under normal circumstances, WHS does not play well with dynamic disks.

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