I have been meaning to finish this off for a while and getting this thing up and running was not that straight forward at all.
My original plan was to run this server on hardware raid over 5 x 1tb drives. this would include both the system drive and the data storage. Great plan, however, WHS seemed to have other ideas. Firstly I used the Intel embedded storage manager to create two raid volumes, a bootable C drive and a larger D drive. both Raid 5 using all 5 drives with 64kb blocks on C and 128k blocks on D (bigger files, bigger blocks etc.).
WHS just would not install on this, after the pain of having to create a driver floppy (a 3.5 disk, remember them?). not one PC in the house had a working floppy drive and I had dumped all my old 3.5 inch disks 4 years ago during a house move.
I managed to find a working USB floppy at work and make the required driver disks, however windows just would not install on my nice sensible raid. I tried for a week and then a work trip got in the way so I downed tools and ent off to Las Vegas (for work honestly).
Whilst I was in Las Vegas, I discovered Frys Electronics. It's kind of like a small corner of Sham Shui Po in Hong Kong without the tofu and wet market. Still perplexed by WHS's refusal to bend to my hardware demands, I went for a wander around this newly discovered world of computer goodies. If I needed a single boring drive to get this server going, what could fit the bill and not be such a glaring single point of failure?
Fry's had just started selling a range of SSD drives. This would give me a single drive but with no moving parts. This should work just fine. As I had filled all the internal SATA ports with 1tb drives, I would also need an additional SATA controller. a quick Google and a read of the box it came in, and I found a PCI SATA controller that had drivers for 2003 and picked up an 80gb SSD.
After winning big in Vegas and wearing out shoes and knees walking around the convention center, I got back and continued the WHS quest.
This time, I created two huge 2gb volumes across all 5 disks due to 2003's 2tb hangup and installed the new controller and SSD into the HP. After a little fiddling with the config and boot order, WHS finally installed and booted up.
WHS then allowed me to add the 2 new raid volumes as storage drives to the system and off we went. I created new shares to mirror my old server and then used MS rich copy to copy all my content across then relocated the server into the loft and put it onto the UPS. I did not however stop using the old server, opting to just sync content to the new server and give it time to settle in and to see if it was going to flame out or die.
lucky I did.
A couple of days later, the unthinkable happened, drives 1 and 2 failed!! The system went into radi rebuild and failed (lost more than 1 drive) and WHS complained about everything being screwed / duplicated and I was basically sunk. I turned out that the failure was caused by the power Y cable I had to use and swapped it out and the drives came up and the server could then be rebuilt.
Not happy about this, I had a dig around google and read up on the pros and cons of WHS drive extender. Based on my experiences with large storage systems at work (we have around 250tb across various systems), I thought I would dump raid and go with the folder mirroring in WHS.
As the system was still booting and running of the single SSD, I firstly went in and deleted all all the files stored in the various shares, deleted the shares themselves and then in storage manager removed the raid volumes from the storage pool. I then rebooted the machine and deleted both Raid volumes, leaving me with just 5 single drives.
I then restarted WHS and went back into the console and was presented with 5 unused drives. I added all of then to the storage pool and then re-created my shares. this time for all the shares I enabled folder mirroring. OK so it's not as efficient as raid 5, but in the long term storage is cheap and this allows me to be flexible in how my files are managed and how I grow the system moving forward.
I then copied the media back into the newly created shares and let the storage management balance and replicate my data, at the file level across my pool of 5 separate drives.
I think the fact that the replication is done at the file level is very important. In a raid system, it's at a block level, your files are broken up and evenly spread across a number of drives, and this is fine when everything works but a raid system is just that, it's a system composed of a set of matched parts. your data will only be available as long as the system (excluding parity) survives.
With the drive extender, your files are distributed across a a pair of drives, like raid 0 but at a file level, so each f the drives have a complete copy of the file. Now I haven't
funny I should mention that.....
WHS complained that the storage pool was broken. This time however the fix was simple. As everything was mirrored, I did not loose anything. I just went into the storage manager and removed the dead drive from the storage pool. this just updated the pointers removing reference to any copy of a file that was on that drive.
I then ejected the drive and sent it off under warranty.
Disk extender then rebuilt the mirroring of the files across the remaining drives restoring my file resilience. When the replacement drive comes back I will add it to the pools and the files will then be distributed back across all 5 again. This is all done whilst the server is running and serving clients.
I think this is not a bad way to work. And drive extender realy needs to be something that Microsoft keep in the next version of WHS (but they are apparently dropping it!)
The server is now happy and running OK. At this time, I am still waiting for the replacement drive but it's doing OK so far.
Other things it is doing is backing up the main PC downstairs every night and it did back up my laptop too until the laptop died again. As WHS is really server 2003, it also has all the server features still hidden away too. I have now also got WHS acting as my home DNS with all my IP devices registered in my home zone and the DNS forwarding on other queries to my usual external DNS provider. I have also got it providing DHCP services for about 10 devices.
For media, I have installed Jriver media center on the server, and I use this to manage my music library and also jump out to Amazon via it's GUI to purchase MP3s. The Amazon MP3 downloader is also installed, and this allows my to download purchases directly into the music library.
For a media server, I have added the Twonkymedia server. This can serve out Music, pictures and video. In the lounge, we use a Sony network attached bluray player with the Sony Bravia portal. This can access Twonky on WHS and play stills, audio and video to the lounge TV.
For music around the house, I have a Roku M1001 sound bridge. This box happily acts as a renderer and teamed with the Twonky Android app, can receive playlists and play music. I just purchased a second Roku (They don't make them anymore) and this will become the BBQ player linking back to the WHS via Wifi and being controlled from the android app.
It's all coming together rather well!
 |
| Surgery continues |
WHS just would not install on this, after the pain of having to create a driver floppy (a 3.5 disk, remember them?). not one PC in the house had a working floppy drive and I had dumped all my old 3.5 inch disks 4 years ago during a house move.
I managed to find a working USB floppy at work and make the required driver disks, however windows just would not install on my nice sensible raid. I tried for a week and then a work trip got in the way so I downed tools and ent off to Las Vegas (for work honestly).
Whilst I was in Las Vegas, I discovered Frys Electronics. It's kind of like a small corner of Sham Shui Po in Hong Kong without the tofu and wet market. Still perplexed by WHS's refusal to bend to my hardware demands, I went for a wander around this newly discovered world of computer goodies. If I needed a single boring drive to get this server going, what could fit the bill and not be such a glaring single point of failure?
 |
| The extra controller |
 |
| The drive "mounted" in the PC |
This time, I created two huge 2gb volumes across all 5 disks due to 2003's 2tb hangup and installed the new controller and SSD into the HP. After a little fiddling with the config and boot order, WHS finally installed and booted up.
lucky I did.
A couple of days later, the unthinkable happened, drives 1 and 2 failed!! The system went into radi rebuild and failed (lost more than 1 drive) and WHS complained about everything being screwed / duplicated and I was basically sunk. I turned out that the failure was caused by the power Y cable I had to use and swapped it out and the drives came up and the server could then be rebuilt.
Not happy about this, I had a dig around google and read up on the pros and cons of WHS drive extender. Based on my experiences with large storage systems at work (we have around 250tb across various systems), I thought I would dump raid and go with the folder mirroring in WHS.
I then restarted WHS and went back into the console and was presented with 5 unused drives. I added all of then to the storage pool and then re-created my shares. this time for all the shares I enabled folder mirroring. OK so it's not as efficient as raid 5, but in the long term storage is cheap and this allows me to be flexible in how my files are managed and how I grow the system moving forward.
I then copied the media back into the newly created shares and let the storage management balance and replicate my data, at the file level across my pool of 5 separate drives.
I think the fact that the replication is done at the file level is very important. In a raid system, it's at a block level, your files are broken up and evenly spread across a number of drives, and this is fine when everything works but a raid system is just that, it's a system composed of a set of matched parts. your data will only be available as long as the system (excluding parity) survives.
With the drive extender, your files are distributed across a a pair of drives, like raid 0 but at a file level, so each f the drives have a complete copy of the file. Now I haven't
funny I should mention that.....
WHS complained that the storage pool was broken. This time however the fix was simple. As everything was mirrored, I did not loose anything. I just went into the storage manager and removed the dead drive from the storage pool. this just updated the pointers removing reference to any copy of a file that was on that drive.
I then ejected the drive and sent it off under warranty.
Disk extender then rebuilt the mirroring of the files across the remaining drives restoring my file resilience. When the replacement drive comes back I will add it to the pools and the files will then be distributed back across all 5 again. This is all done whilst the server is running and serving clients.
I think this is not a bad way to work. And drive extender realy needs to be something that Microsoft keep in the next version of WHS (but they are apparently dropping it!)
The server is now happy and running OK. At this time, I am still waiting for the replacement drive but it's doing OK so far.
Other things it is doing is backing up the main PC downstairs every night and it did back up my laptop too until the laptop died again. As WHS is really server 2003, it also has all the server features still hidden away too. I have now also got WHS acting as my home DNS with all my IP devices registered in my home zone and the DNS forwarding on other queries to my usual external DNS provider. I have also got it providing DHCP services for about 10 devices.
For media, I have installed Jriver media center on the server, and I use this to manage my music library and also jump out to Amazon via it's GUI to purchase MP3s. The Amazon MP3 downloader is also installed, and this allows my to download purchases directly into the music library.
For a media server, I have added the Twonkymedia server. This can serve out Music, pictures and video. In the lounge, we use a Sony network attached bluray player with the Sony Bravia portal. This can access Twonky on WHS and play stills, audio and video to the lounge TV.
For music around the house, I have a Roku M1001 sound bridge. This box happily acts as a renderer and teamed with the Twonky Android app, can receive playlists and play music. I just purchased a second Roku (They don't make them anymore) and this will become the BBQ player linking back to the WHS via Wifi and being controlled from the android app.
It's all coming together rather well!
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