ServeTheHome – Intel Xeon AMD Opteron RAID Controller Reviews

As many have read, I have been trying different NAS solutions on the Big Windows Home Server. This guide will show the base procedures for installing open-source NAS/ SAN appliances such as FreeNAS, OpenFiler, Ubuntu (and other Linux distros), OpenSolaris (and variants such as CentOS) into a Hyper-V VM. 

For this guide, I will be using screenshots from the Hyper-V manager in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2. Microsoft offers a free Hyper-V Server R2 product for those that want to try and do not have access to a Server 2008 R2 testbed. Later I will detail installing the OS’es onto the Hyper-V platforms, but I wanted a base article that showed the basics so I can link rather than duplicate later (think of this as WordPress Dedupe). It should be noted up-front this guide is for a non-Windows Hyper-V installation. Also, everything below can be changed as necessary for your environment/ installation. 

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A few weeks ago, I had my main system’s OCZ Vertex 120GB drive die after a Firmware version 1.5 update. After applying the allegedly successful v1.5 firmware update, I started seeing data corruption issues. A few days later, the drive failed to be recognized by any system I own regardless of which onboard SATA controller I tried or even with raid card was used. Just to give an idea of the timeline:

1. Day 0- the SSD drive died, RMA request sent to OCZ (past working hours)
2. Day 1- SSD information such as serial numbers was given to OCZ and a RMA number was issued
3. Day 2 (Friday)- SSD was shipped to OCZ’s San Jose, CA facility (which is <20 miles away)
4. Day 5 (Monday)- SSD was delivered to OCZ
5. Day 9 (Friday)- Another SSD arrived via FedEx from OCZ in shrinkwraped retail packaging

Somewhere in there I ordered another 120GB Vertex from Amazon.com which arrived on Day 8 of the timeline above since I was running out of space anyway.

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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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Many Windows Home Server (WHS) users use their machines as remote desktop gateways. Although remote desktop connection is functionally great, one annoyance sometimes rears its ugly head, the inability to reboot or shutdown a PC through RDC. Here is a screenshot of what this looks like:

Remote Desktop menu does not include restart and shutdown

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As many have saw, Intel Corporation unvieled its new Atom platform for small business and home storage/ NAS products at CeBIT. It seems like this is not a Windows Home Server V2 (WHS V2) or Vail solution.
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