Your Home Server Fantasies and a cheap "replacement" for WHS v.1 and 2011

[BonzaiDuck]

I happened across this article on Maximum PC. I probably have the issue sitting in a pile of back copies for the last three or more years. And somehow -- I missed it.

This addresses some of the frustrations you'll find in maybe two other threads about hardware and SW in WHS. In most ways, I'd been pleased with it. I've been on a wild-goose-chase of troubleshooting though for a couple weeks: The "elusive DPC and Interrupt latency problem." What you get using old (old!) hardware even for a dated "home server" OS.

I may actually discover that I have more hardware problems than graphics card and drivers. Maybe not, though. Oddly, the article points up using a socket-1156 Clarksdale i3 530 with Windows 8 to build "The Server."

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/windows/windows_8_home_server_guide?page=0,0

I might also begin to think "Gee, Whiz! I can become cozy (finally) with Windows 8 by using it as a Home Server!" Who-woulda-thought?!

 

[code65536]

My server is Windows 8.1. The whole server SKU thing is pretty arbitrary anyway; if you know what you're doing, you can make a client OS a server or a server OS a client. Storage Spaces is excellent, and the reason I use a client OS is because it supports Media Center (since my server is also my DVR) and because I like to have a common platform (it's easier to manage 5 installs of 8.1 than 4 installs of 8.1 and 1 install of some other OS).

 

[ViRGE]

Win8 can certainly serve as a server platform. But it's best used for light file serving only; if you need backups or web access, Windows and Windows Server will quickly set themselves apart.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Win8 can certainly serve as a server platform. But it's best used for light file serving only; if you need backups or web access, Windows and Windows Server will quickly set themselves apart.

Well, there's my "other" thread about WHS. It's all about my unwillingness to replace older hardware that still works well. And you can use Win 8 -- as code65536 said -- because it provides features paralleling WHS media-streaming. But the WHS allows for whole-sale backup of all your other systems -- except if they run Win 8 as clients.

I'd already said somewhere that I was using W2KPro for a "file-server," proxy-server and DHCP server for about a year until we got a broadband subscription around 2001. Then it was a file-server for another couple years, and that box was a 1993/94 i486 system!! Here and this time, the disparity between household OS's and the hardware has an overlap.

It could be argued that I'm "nickel-and-diming" my way toward more expense than just flat-out replacing the ASUS/NVidia motherboard, but I can harvest the parts for other household systems if it comes to that.

As Virge only implies, the backup features of Win 2008R2-based-WHS are stellar -- for Win 7 or earlier clients. It eliminates running an individual backup scheme for all the other workstations, and the bare-metal restore capabilities are there.

Quite frankly, I was amazed the other day since I've been taking the WHS apart -- removing add-ins and drivers for diagnostic purposes. In such a situation, it still went out and successfully backed up two of our (WHS-connector-updated) systems successfully.

I can SEE why M$ doesn't want to offer it anymore. They -- like Intel -- see the mobile writing on the wall. Everybody in the mainstream doesn't want to fiddle with Geek_Squad or Windows configuration, and they don't want to be bound to a desktop. IF you want a Server OS, they leave you with the price-tag for Server Essentials or something. Or they figure you'll just get an extra Win 8 license and follow the Maximum PC thoughts for it in this way.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Favorite Linux distro and mdadm raid. It's very standard and stable and it wont be taken away from you like what MS did with DE. I've learned to try not to rely on anything proprietary for home use because it's too unpredictable whether or not it will be pulled at some point. For storage you want something sustainable that you can count on for many years to come, and something that is expandable so you can grow the arrays over time by adding more drives. My first mdraid array was made in 2008 and is still running today. All the drives have been changed and the array has been expanded quite a lot since, but the file system itself is original and was never taken offline other than a few hardware related incidents, as well as planed server outages where I had to turn off the server, such as when I moved the drives to the new storage server.

This is my storage server:



I can just add more drives as I need and expand volumes on the fly without having to take them offline. It's a pretty nice setup and standard with pretty much any Linux distro. That box is running CentOS 6.

Another option is ZFS. I have not used it personally but I heard good things about it. It works very differently from raid and it's actually it's own file system but apparently it's very efficient. I don't think you can expand arrays on the fly though. To me that is the biggest thing and why I keep using mdadm raid.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Interesting proposition, there, Squirrel. But it's about getting from A to B.

You chose A when you built that rig, and it was a great choice. I should have looked into something like that myself and built a Linux box. But I've been at my "point A" for a while, and I don't want to take the utopian leap to your "point A."

My only troubles seem to boil down to particular hardware choices (nFarce) and drivers-behaving-badly.

See -- if you saw this high-DPC/interrupt-latency operating on one core, you might think "Everything is at risk!" -- but it's not. I see a strategy, though, for killing the SATA in BIOS and using another controller -- which has "no drivers" except those built in to M$ OS.

I can entertain choosing your own "point A," but I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel on my little peeves and troubles. I can entertain all that especially if I can keep this running for another few years in the meantime.

So -- first -- choose a path, mindful of what you mentioned in the way of proprietary OS and HW snags. Once the path looks good -- find the money and time. If I wait long enough while cleaning up this here and that there -- there will be money -- and more time . . .

 

[Essence_of_War]

don't think you can expand arrays on the fly though.

You can, you just have to make sure you understand how ZFS treats pools and VDevs. In ZFS, redundancy is implemented at the level of the VDevs. Data is dynamically striped across all of the VDevs so if any VDev fails, the pool is lost.

You can always expand a pool by adding additional VDEVs to it.

With one exception, turning a VDev consisting of a single drive into a mirror'd VDev, VDevs cannot have additional drives added to them.

While you cannot add additional drives to a VDev once it has been created, if your VDev has redundancy, you can certainly swap+rebuild drives in a VDev for larger capacity ones, one at a time, and in that way expand the storage pool.

As an additional note, ZFSonLinux is native, has been quite stable for over a year, and seems likely to remain stable and well supported as long as the folks at LLNL are interested in the project.

 

[Gunbuster]

If you are a student you can get Server 2012 R2 Standard or Datacenter for free at Microsoft DreamSpark.

 

[tomt4535]

I migrated my WHS v1 system to Ubuntu running ZFSonLinux a little under a year ago and it has been awesome. While I have a smaller system of 3 1TB drives, if I needed to store more data, I would have no issues making a bigger array with ZFS on Linux. It was a breeze to set up and is crazy fast. Grab a cheap SATA controller off eBay with tons of ports and set up ZFS, you won't be disappointed.

 

[Zaap]

It's a pretty nice setup...

Completely disagree. That setup is not "pretty nice..."

More like "completely freakin awesome."

Seriously though, I have server envy! Makes me want to put my server into a nice rack mount setup like that. I shudder to ask what your total storage amount is, and potential max?

 

[MrTransistorm]

I migrated my WHS v1 system to Ubuntu running ZFSonLinux a little under a year ago and it has been awesome. While I have a smaller system of 3 1TB drives, if I needed to store more data, I would have no issues making a bigger array with ZFS on Linux. It was a breeze to set up and is crazy fast. Grab a cheap SATA controller off eBay with tons of ports and set up ZFS, you won't be disappointed.

I also ditched WHSv1 for Linux about three years ago. I had a failing storage drive that caused WHS to BSOD. A storage drive should not cause the whole system to crash! On top of that, WHS failed to detect any problems with the drive after rebooting. :thumbsdown:

I immediately dumped WHS for Debian Squeeze. I bought a couple more storage drives and created a RAID5 array using mdadm. It had better performance and fault tolerance than WHS's Drive Extender, and the OS in general was more response and stable. And this was on an ancient Pentium 4 system.

In May 2012 I built a new home server with a 2600K and a Z77 board. I had a little trouble trying to run Squeeze on it (since the hardware was so new). I didn't feel comfortable going with Wheezy (since it was still in Testing phase at the time), so I installed Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS. I plugged in the 4-disk RAID5 array from the old server, and mdadm easily detected the RAID superblock. All I had to do was add one line each to mdadm.conf and fstab to have it automatically start and mount the array. I have since added a 5th drive and converted the array to RAID6.

I've been much happier with Linux as a home server than I ever was with WHS. It's more responsive, more stable, easier to maintain and troubleshoot, and it's completely free (in both senses of the term)!

Note: I originally went with mdadm at the time because ZFSonLinux wasn't ready yet. I am interested in switching to ZFS since it has a lot more features. Sometime this summer I plan to add a bunch more drives and switch to ZFS.

Granted diving head first into a CLI-only Linux system is probably not the best choice for other people who may be used to a Windows GUI, but there are many *nix alternatives out there that are easier to set up and manage. Some are even built specifically for home/media server use.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

My fileserver/HTPCs :
Win7x64 Ultimate
PII X6 1045T
16GB
Radeon 5670 GDDR5
16x Hitachi Coolspin 4TB HDDs

Redundancy is achieved by having two identical 64TB fileservers - 1 with my brother in IA, 1 here with me in Dallas.
Some parts of these damned things (case, PSU, etc.) are ancient - they used to hold a crap-ton of IDE drives on Promise controllers

 

[BonzaiDuck]

By the grace of God, there is one and only one reason I'm logging on to Anandtech this afternoon.

First -- about my own server box, which is also mentioned in a couple other threads on this forum.

I wanted to completely kill the nFarce controller configuration I had on it. NOT -- because the controller or the drives were causing problems; ONLY because the DRIVERS for nFarce were interfering with other things and causing core 0 of the CPU to show 80% usage while the other cores were tripping along at below 3%. I had enough info from Win 7 and WHS users about old NVidia hardware to KNOW!! -- yes KNOW what was wrong there, even if the knowledge might seem "inconclusive." I could just let the server trip along with the newly-installed C2Q Q6600 I stuck in the motherboard the other day -- hoping at that time to find out if there was a hardware failure causing this to happen. there wasn't. It's a DRIVER problem.

And like I said, I could just let this server keep on trippin' and truckin'. To resolve the problem before throwing out the old hardware entirely, I found another intersection in my web queries. People who wanted to do the same thing -- get rid of the nFarce. And the solution was one which I had proposed here or in the storage forum also in recent days: a PCI-E SATA-III disk controller which offered "port-multiplier," default AHCI, RAID 0, 1, 1+0 and 0+1. The skinny on the street said it worked GREAT with win 7 and WHS. Linux and Ubuntu users were unhappy with it. But the Intel community thread touting the same Marvell chip was pretty darn clear.

Then there's StableBit. I've discovered that I can move these four data disks from here to there and back again, and even with a fresh install of WHS 2011, once Stablebit is added to the software mix, it simply goes out and finds those disks, organizes the pool array, and -- good to go. Doesn't matter if the drive labels are different, either. It just does it -- with complete reliability.

So. Here I am, waiting one more day before the little Startech [Marvell] controller arrives, getting all ready with backups of backups, and backups on top of 'em. I'm wondering about configuring the two Seagate NAS 2TB drives I bought. I'm researching MBR and GPT to refresh myself. I'm reviewing the "AF" disk issue.

And suddenly, my aging brain forgets that I had resolve this "AF" issue back in 2012 with an e-mail to Western Digital. I was worried that my boot disk on my flagship workstation wasn't "properly aligned." I found a test program somebody recommended.

I was in a hurry. I have an ISRT setup on that machine. And I ALWAYS fiddled with the ISRT config with some care, but never had a problem. I'd enable and disable the HDD acceleration with nary a problem. Perhaps, though, I always re-initialized the SSD for further use as the cache disk. Instead == I was in a hurry -- I rebooted the system. Suddenly, my flagship workstation cannot boot!

Tried the usual, which had worked before from another mishap of not turning the system off when I cloned the disk with the same drive signature: boot from the Windows Install CD, select repair. Didn't work this time. I had successfully cloned the HDD in middle of February, and thought I could chuck it in and just boot up. But I had "fixed things" since then that were not fixed at that time. I didn't want to go back through the entire log of troubleshoots and fixes. What to do?! What to do?!

The WHS server is still a "work in progress" as I move toward the controller changeover. BUT!! I DID re-enable the client computer backups for the WHOLE DAMN HOUSE!! And last night, between midnight and 6AM, WHS backup up all those machines from scratch (since I had erased all the old backups.)

Find a drive! I thought. The BIOS would show the original boot drive, but I couldn't get WHS's thumb-drive bootable repair program to see it. Finally I got the 1TB backup I'd made yesterday of the entire server. [As I say this, I pray that suddenly nothing goes wrong with that until I can back it up again!!] Reinitialized the 1TB Samsung F3. Started restoring: first, the stubby unlabeled "system" partition of ~100MB. Then, the C: drive.

Took four hours. And during that time, I was wondering "What if it won't boot because the cache disk is no longer connected?" I was searching the web on another computer, and found a blog by some a**h*** who was complaining that "WHS 2011 was seriously flawed" because it wouldn't "shrink" his backup to fit the new replacement boot drive. Even that seemed devastating to my confidence.

Went to the grocery on family errands, hurried hurried hurried to get back. Waited for what seemed like hours.

Finally, I get to the dialog box in the WHS client-restore screen that has the "finish" button. "Click finish and your computer will restart," it said.

REALLY?! I'm thinking. C'mon! REEE-ALLY?!! I was planning on more stations of the cross, litanies of pain, cycles of frustrated failure.

Went into BIOS, put the boot order to go to the Samsung drive after an empty optical drive was found.

We're back! We're bad!! Ba-bad! Bad, bad, bu-baaaa-ud! Those wingtip bozos don't have nuthin' on me! I thought.

So I'm happier . . . than a PIG . . . IN . . . . SH . . . --POOP!!

 

[Red Squirrel]

Completely disagree. That setup is not "pretty nice..."

More like "completely freakin awesome."

Seriously though, I have server envy! Makes me want to put my server into a nice rack mount setup like that. I shudder to ask what your total storage amount is, and potential max?

Hehe yeah I'm quite happy with it. Here's a farther pic:



Second rack does not have much in it, it's going to be mostly dedicated for power stuff and potential cisco lab. The custom rack is for batteries. I can run 4 hours on UPS.

Right now I "only" have about 11TB of total space (real usable space), but depending on how I set things up I could have the potential for like 85TB if I filled it with 4TB drives and did a giant raid 5. That would probably be a bad idea though. Right now I have a raid 10 with 4x 3TB drives and raid 5 with 8x1TB drives.

[root@isengard ~]# df -hl
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/vg_isengard-lv_root
                       50G  4.3G   43G  10% /
tmpfs                 3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sde1             485M   38M  422M   9% /boot
/dev/mapper/vg_isengard-lv_home
                       53G  180M   50G   1% /home
/dev/md0              5.4T  3.7T  1.5T  71% /volumes/raid1
/dev/md1              6.3T  4.1T  2.0T  68% /volumes/raid2
[root@isengard ~]#

You can ignore the other enclosures below it, those are proprietary and are smaller drives. I get a half decent amount of space (couple TB if I recall) out of it with raid 6 but I don't depend on it for day to day stuff as it uses too much power, and if a drive fails I can't replace it. I only leave there because it looks cool, and it's fibre channel.

Though if I really needed more space (realistically I'll probably get like 50ish TB max out of that 24 bay server if I split it up into LUNs and do raid 10s) I could ditch the IBM ones and add more of those Supermicro cases. Some of those cases also have drives in the back. I think some even can hold like 90 drives. I don't see myself getting close to that any time soon though. Lot of my disk usage is VMs, and I like to preallocate my VMs so if I give a VM a 20GB drive then the file is actually 20GB and wont grow. So what ends up happening is my disk usage is high but does not move much other than standard data like movies and stuff like that.

 

[alkemyst]

why?

 

[Zaap]

Why not? That is just a seriously cool setup Red Squirrel. I only wish I had the space and ability to set up something similar. For me its not just about what I need today, its about what I know ill need in years to come.

A little over a decade ago I used to think I'd never need more than 50GB or so of storage. Flash forward to now, and I'm scrambling to keep about 10TB of data properly backed up. (Tons of family photos and videos, a ton of media, various business projects (video editing) and just a lifetime of files.) Eventually my kids will be adding their own files to the mix. I need to build a server that can expand as I need it easily with plenty of redundancy... overkill beats the heck out of "woefully inadequate" when it.comes to preserving your data.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Why not? That is just a seriously cool setup Red Squirrel. I only wish I had the space and ability to set up something similar. For me its not just about what I need today, its about what I know ill need in years to come.

A little over a decade ago I used to think I'd never need more than 50GB or so of storage. Flash forward to now, and I'm scrambling to keep about 10TB of data properly backed up. (Tons of family photos and videos, a ton of media, various business projects (video editing) and just a lifetime of files.) Eventually my kids will be adding their own files to the mix. I need to build a server that can expand as I need it easily with plenty of redundancy... overkill beats the heck out of "woefully inadequate" when it.comes to preserving your data.

Yeah -- overkill has its merits. But I've got nearly 30 years of files, financial stuff, document scans, photos etc. taking up perhaps 500 or 600GB -- or double those numbers because of the duplication feature. Client backups are another 500GB. That leaves "movies" and DVR TV-program captures -- another 500+GB. I'm thinking that 6 to 8TB is neither excessive nor limiting at this time. Frankly -- I can do fine with just 4TB -- for now, anyway.