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PostPosted: Fri Mar 01, 2013 1:15 pm 
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Found this on Barnes & Nobles today its an Introduction to WS2012 based on the Beta and its a free eBook Download. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/introdu ... 0735669765

I stopped by Barnes & Noble and just purchased a couple books on WS2012 so that I could get a better understanding of my test run with it this weekend. Test runs are fun because you get to muck around with them and if you mess things up you get to figure out how to correct your mistake. Its a good learning process. I like physical books over eBooks but hey this thing was free so I thought I would bring it to your attention.

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PostPosted: Fri Mar 01, 2013 6:08 pm 
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I think you will really like it, I am very quickly talking myself into it. I am looking to upgrade my 2 netbooks to win7starter and then I have 1 laptop that might run it. Thx for the link on the freebie, I will grab when I get home.
I know we could run whs2011 for a good many years with drivebender or stablebit, but, I'm looking at something that microsoft will maybe :^o stick with down the road, I mean If we give them enough money maybe #-o .

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PostPosted: Sat Mar 02, 2013 5:14 am 
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Operating Systems evolve and if your looking for something to carry you for the long haul will be challenging. Now I have always said nothing is obsolete until you deem it so.

WHS v1 is many ways is a still a viable solution when it comes to backing up your clients and acting as a central file storage solution. It also can do many other things but its 32bit OS has its limitations but for the needs of most people its more than adequate its just many do not like the fact that its a discontinued OS.

WHS2011 does mostly the same thing as WHSv1 but with out a DE Solution. While its newer and 64 bit its support from Microsoft is limited and soon will go the way of WHS v1 if not there now. What they both have in common is that they support the OS's people are currently using like XP, VISTA, 7 and 8 so for OS Backup Support WHS is a better solution than they WS2012 and lest costly or is it really less costly?

Both versions of WHS only natively support drives up to 2TB in size and what is interesting to me about WS2012E is that it can support larger than 2TB Drives and the cost for those larger drive sizes are coming down. As my drives are now only getting older there warranty periods will expire and at which point when I replace them I want to go with the larger drives. If I can stick with my current configuration or go with a slightly larger enclosure I can more than double my current capacity yet power the same drive compliment thus saving money over the long term and that cost savings will more than justify the cost of WS2012E by not having to grow the physical server size.

Over the years I have always had a somewhat large hard drive compliment in my devices going back to the 1990's when I ran a BBS and then my primary desktops had multiple drives for storage but back then the drives were much smaller too. So when I look at where I was in 2008 and where I am now nearly 5 years since I started running WHS and looking forward I can not envision the need for more than 30 drives but I would like for them to be self contained in one enclosure not many external enclosures. I have no immediate plans to retire my WHS v1 or 2011 servers until the clients that continue to backup are retired and once that happens then there would be no real need to keep those servers running. Just as Highlander replaced my WHS v1 servers allowing me to downsize them and expand Highlander so to will I do the same with my next server and then downsize highlander. The real trick in doing this will be how do I migrate the data and not lose it along the way.

This is what is going through my mind today where I am reflecting on the past, reviewing the journey and looking to move forward and trying to do so without going broke. While I have an interest in a RAID Solution the cost of such a solution is hard for me to come to terms with because I want a HARDWARE RAID solution but after running Stablebit Drive Pool and being happy with it although not exactly the fastest solution its been a cost effective and viable solution.

Guess my journey is one which is still evolving and today I hope to sit down and install WS2012E on to my old HP ProLiant DL145 Server to see if it can run WS2012E and see what if anything it can do for me. Its old but has a couple of upgraded Opteron CPUs and 16GB of RAM but its so old the SATA Speed is 1.5 GB/s but it should be good enough for the test to allow me to become familiar with the OS.

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PostPosted: Sun Mar 03, 2013 2:10 am 
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I installed it on the ProLiant DL145 and the only drivers I need to install are for the RAID Controller I installed in it along time ago but everything else installed perfectly. Much smoother install then WHS v1 where I have to load up all the motherboard drivers.

Its desktop is very similar to Win 8 so getting around it was easy enough but some of the core parts I wanted to look at were not easily found like the device manager but I managed to get around it. I will play with it only to get familiar with it as I have no intention on dedicating clients to it but I believe there is a workaround for the domain component to turn it into a workgroup but my only interest in doing this is because all my clients are set up for a workgroup although they could be changed to work with a domain. What I do not want to disturb is what I am running now so getting things to work together is my main interest at this time.

The one thing about the domain is that in the past you needed a Pro or Business version of windows to become part of the domain. This of course is not an issue for my clients as they all can be configured to run in a domain environment however not every computer I work on can be configured to do so. This means that if I were to run WS2012 I would also have to keep my current servers running which I expect to do because of the older OS Support they offer.

I am going to have to play with it quite a bit more, install a couple hard drives to see what it can do and to see what other software it will allow me to install.

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PostPosted: Sun Mar 03, 2013 11:20 am 
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I'm with ya, when I think back to the frankenstein JBOD old (retired) workstation file server I was using, to WHSv1, that was huge leap forward. Streaming/Users/remote access/backing up all the PC's in the house (unheard for a lot of home people). I have no problem with WHS1 my data needs are condensed to the very important stuff, over the years I made sure of that and I made the choice of dvd rips to Mpeg because of space, thinking down the road.
You hit the nail on the head I think with price vs space vs an os that microsoft might continue to support and improve instead of abandon. We are at that crossroads again with hardware and that looks like it is going to cost us.
I don't think it's right and if someone wants to stay in the 2tb / 32 bit world then that's a choice, but as I have said, I'm looking down the road and I am seeing 64 bit, 8 gigs min. memory and 4 tb drives protected by the new DE (storage spaces) and that looks like it is going to cost me 300 bucks. I still don't think it's right 300 for a os but I don't think it is right to have vista/win7/win8 in less the 2 years and try to support all that, but that's what we have. Microsoft, for better or worse.

I am upgrading my netbooks now, WHS1 will get us by till it's time to pay the price.
I just hope microsoft sticks with this 2012e #-o

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PostPosted: Sun Mar 03, 2013 5:07 pm 
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Take a close look at the evolution of Microsoft Software particularly Server Software and you will probably be rehashing the Server OS in about 4 years.

For the average home user the cost of this software is too high. Some people are using Win8 as a server and others have started to move away to other solutions while others have a mixed environment.

I still have to play with WS2012 and come to terms with everything.

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PostPosted: Mon Mar 04, 2013 2:58 pm 
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Well I got remote access working on it which brings my ability to access a WHS v1, WHS2011 and now the WS2012E Server all from one network. Progress is being made but if I opted to go with WS2012E then the data migration is going to be a major pain in the you know what so to tackle that I would need to buy more hard drives but I want 4TB drives but the prices need to come down so I am in a holding pattern until I figure out what to do with this.

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PostPosted: Sun Mar 17, 2013 7:20 pm 
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Dbone was posting about 4 and 5 tb reds by the end of the year in the HOT DEAL thread..
http://www.legitreviews.com/news/14620/
That would be a great way to transfer over to a new setup.
I'm looking at puting the OS on a SSD 256gig and then add 3-4 5tb reds, very cool!!! But I don't have as much data as you guys do, a couple Of 2tbs will do me for awhile....

P.S. I do want to get my hands on a windows 8 pro and see if it could be a whs option.
More to come.

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PostPosted: Thu Apr 18, 2013 9:30 pm 
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Gardian wrote:
I do want to get my hands on a windows 8 pro and see if it could be a whs option.

I'm evaluating both W8 and WS12E as a replacement for my WHSv1. The main drawback of W8 to me is that it does not have bare metal backup and restore of client PCs on the network which is the most attractive aspect to me of these Microsoft Server OSes over Linux based ones.


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PostPosted: Fri Apr 19, 2013 1:28 pm 
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unmesh wrote:
Gardian wrote:
I do want to get my hands on a windows 8 pro and see if it could be a whs option.

I'm evaluating both W8 and WS12E as a replacement for my WHSv1. The main drawback of W8 to me is that it does not have bare metal backup and restore of client PCs on the network which is the most attractive aspect to me of these Microsoft Server OSes over Linux based ones.


Just a heads up the Storage spaces in Win8 is not the same as 2012's
I had ok but iffy performance in win8 once I upgraded to 2012 many issues simply went away.

I found if you shop about you can get Win2012 Essentials for $299.
I got mine on sale through Amazon.

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PostPosted: Sat Apr 20, 2013 1:02 pm 
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From what I understand you can use > 2TB drives in WHS 2011 by formatting them as GPT partitions using Disk Manager, not the Dashboard. Of course this excludes your system drive which must be MBR partitions. I also believe that Stablebit Drivepool will support these larger drives too.
The only thing you might lose is Server Backup not suppporting the larger partitions > 2TB but this will not affect me personally.
Correct me if I'm wrong but this is what I intend to do when larger drive prices come down. I just finished upgrading to WHS 2011 on my EX495.

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PostPosted: Sat Apr 20, 2013 3:23 pm 
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I have a couple 4TB Drives running in WHS2011 which also runs Stablebit Drive Pool so yes you can run the larger drives but the have to be GPT to get them to work. I have yet to place larger drives in my test server and probably will not do so until I move away from the test server phase which will either be a new build or I will upgrade my current WHS2011 Server to run WS2012E. I am heavily leaning towards a new build.

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PostPosted: Fri Apr 26, 2013 4:26 am 
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Good to know, thanks. If I can ever get my drives to stop dropping out ( in our other thread) I plan to add a few of these large drives now with WHS 2011

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PostPosted: Fri Apr 26, 2013 4:44 pm 
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Some have attempted to install larger than 2TB drives in their port multipliers only to have issues with drive access. I can if you like move a 4TB Drive to the Port Multiplier to see if it shows up or not. I only have 4 TB Hitachi Deskstars to do this test with for you. I can do the test in a 4 and 5 Bay enclosure.

I only mention this because of posts in the forums which I have read. Not sure if its a controller issue or an issue with the backplanes but I can see what happens on my end. I am just going to do it because I need to know.

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PostPosted: Fri Apr 26, 2013 7:26 pm 
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I moved one of the 4TB Drives to the external enclosure and it was picked up without issue. The server had to be rebooted like 3 different times at its own request to be rebooted the first time was when it saw the drive and then had to load drivers for the drive because its in a new location.

While the drivers were being loaded so the drive could be used Stablebit Drive Pool reported it as missing and then of course when it was all said and done Stablebit Drive Pool checked itself and then you get reports of the backup database not functioning which is typical when Stablebit Drive Pool is checking the drive pool.

So I am not sure why others had issues with the larger drives accept to say they may have been running WHS v1 or some other reason but it worked for me so its possible to run the larger drives in the older Sans Digital Enclosures.

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