Windows home server vails

After several restarts and entering in the correct data, you can start using your new Virtual Vail Server! We will be covering how to do that in future articles. The final thing we need to do is install VMware Tools for a more fluid experience while testing it out. If you go to another machine on your network, you will see the WHS Vail server listed under Network…just like it were a real machine.

Here we are using the Dashboard on a physical machine and backing it up to the virtual Vail server. You can use it just like you would use it if it were on an actual box on your network. There is a lot to explore in the new version of Home Server and using it on a VM is a great way to test it, without having to worry about crashing an actual box. Also, the Vail beta and VMware Player are both free which is always cool.

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Best Phone Chargers. Best Wi-Fi Range Extenders. Best Oculus Quest 2 Accessories. Best iPad Air Cases. Awesome PC Accessories. Best Linux Laptops. Best Wireless iPhone Earbuds. Best Bluetooth Trackers. Best eReaders. If you wanted to do this, you would need to: 1. Repeat with the second disk. I would strongly suggest not using VAIL for data that you do not want to lose.

VAIL is still an early beta and in all liklihood installing newer versions of VAIL will require a complete reinstall, potentially destroying all data. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Sign me up for the STH newsletter! This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

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Microsoft, you are ship adrift without direction or planning. These kinds of outrageous mistakes are why you are so disrespected by your customers and so many of us are moving to greener pastures, ala Apple. It was a fantastic way to pool drives without the risks of RAID issues. Now what do we have? You seem, to me, to be acting out some kind of petulant child routine by dropping DE altogether. With the well deserved criticism of DE v2 in Vail you've gone and just thrown a tantrum and thrown the whole thing out the window without considering the fact that you should have gone back and fixed it right, not build something that was obviously prone to failure just by it's very design.

V1 is fine, it works, we ALL use it and like it. Please take a deep breath, think, and deliver your customers the solution you promised and we deserve.

Bring back V1 with fixes. There's simply no reason to deploy it any longer. I'll be taking my new hardware and moving my existing WHS v1 to that new machine to improve performance and will not be moving to Vail. While I am quite disappointed with this announcement, I actually find this rather amusing at the same time.

The title is quite blunt, RAID is not a consumer technology. But wait, there's more! Here's a nice quote:. Of course this is what many of us knew all along. Proper RAID controller cards get expensive fast, it can be a pain to add or remove storage, and simply cannot be set up by users with little or no technical knowledge. It's made clear that the purpose of WHS was to not only make things better, but simple too. Vail no longer has useful purpose in the context of the WHS product.

Vail showed a lot of potential, and easily could have been an exceptional product, but now it can only be mediocre at best, and for those of us with WHSv1, there is no incentive whatsoever to upgrade. God it got removed. I would love its feature, cause I don't even use the raid I would never use raid in my life. Hope there are better features then raid For me this is a dealbreaker. I no longer need to plan for migration from WHS v1 to Vail. Problem is, I will need to look for a long-term replacement for WHS.

This is a deeply disappointing decision which suggests real cluelessness as to why people use WHS. I could have understood if they took time out to consider an easier way to migrate storage, but just to abandon me as a customer? I have to throw my two cents in on this as well. I have recommended WHS to a lot of very non-technical people.

People who just worry about their backup solution. It was awesome that they could purchase the appliance, take it home and plug it in. When they ran low on space because they were backup up multiple PCs and moving all their family VHS tapes to digital files they would just hop down to the store, buy any external USB drive they liked and just plug it in. Two minutes later after running through the console they were up and running. Unless RAID technology has gotten a LOT better the barrier for adding new storage is just going to be too high for many of these folks.

When they say they've spoken to where the SMB and consumer I think there in lies the problem. Some small businesses figured out it could be used very easily for a backup solution and so I say, ROCK ON to them; however, what this led to those same SMB people asking for more business like features in the product. I feel like this is taking WHS away from the consumer roots it had.

If it is primarily people who understand what RAID really is then maybe this isn't a bad move overall; however, if the majority of the consumers are people like my parents, then I think this is a very, very bad move indeed including the fact that it means my technical support demands would get increased.

I've said this before: I know personally in the "Hi, Joe! How'd you like the Eagles game? Of those, some are more technically inclined, some less so. Two of them have more than a TB of data in the storage pool, and I'm one of the two. I firmly believe that this is a typical consumer distribution. Overall, probably there are more HP units in small businesses serving as backup tools and simple file servers than there are in homes being used by consumers.

At the end of the day, this was a business-oriented decision; see Paul Thurrott's blog post here for more information on why the decision was made. Note that this is information that MVPs were not privy to. We were told several weeks ago that Drive Extender was being removed, but it was basically a "Please go evangelize for us so we don't get too bad a drubbing" type of conversation. Well, Microsoft doesn't pay me to evangelize the product seriously; I probably spend several hundred hours a year on this, and all the nice stuff Microsoft does for me amounts well under minimum wage , I do it because I like Windows Home Server.

I think this is a huge mistake, made so that the code base will better support business deployment, and ignoring the needs of consumers. Microsoft is going to get lambasted in the media they already are , and I think they deserve every bit of the abuse they'll receive The WHS aimed incredibly challenging to merge several purposes. First WHS as a server, i. Second a "backup"-device, i. These are two incompatible goals.

Hence the faint and fuzzy terms about, what actually is the purpose of the duplication. Duplication also enticing the user to believe the data already on the safe side. In addition, Microsoft has with DE thankless task imposed to make lousy users hardware safer than it is. Thus, Microsoft should tend to stand for shortcomings that not to answer for Microsoft.

A look in the relevant fora sufficient see WHS is often used in conjunction with some sort of hardware recipes with leftovers. People apparently believe that still a WHS tinker easily from old scrap hardware. I don't think this is a desirable consumer audience. These people do this today, tomorrow that secure Microsoft customers are not anyway.

The duplication is also much too inflexible, adjustable only per share. In addition the temporal aspect of extensibility, scalability of storage system. In DE2 a striping system had to be introduced ultimately software compatibility. But such a system is not well tolerated with the demand for scalability of the storage system. Because under striping the probability and the extent of potential damage increases with each additional hard disk, except that the distribution is limited data on two hard disks or so.

But this creates an enormous administrative burden. DE an inherently very delicate technique makes probably in substance use by dynamic volumes. Availability performance , security and flexibility scalability are goals you cannot optimize together, especially not under an easy-to-use maxime.

I appreciate the availability of the super target of the merger of specified sub-objectives in advance was not sufficiently screened. But the simple storage scalability problem will remain probably unresolved. Yet I welcome that DE is abandoned, a contradictory and half-hearted project. And I look forward to a new clear and strong WHS.

What a way to start the Holidays I'm pretty disappointed as well. Put all my movies on an external 2TB drive and just left the Drive Extended drives with my home PC backups and duplicated folders in the V1 box.

Folder duplication of valuable files - music, family videos, and photographs mainly was something that made me feel secure. External backup of these files to a non DE drive I could store somewhere else was also great. All very cool and extremely useful. I love WHS. Is that not possible in Vail? Would it mean that the disks need to be pre-configured prior to installing WHS V2, or perhaps during the installation process, then you are stuck with what you started with?

And adding storage down the line is a lot tougher. Is that what I'm hearing? Bottom line is ease of PC backup and secure reliable file storage with the ability to increase capacity when required is my bottom line and I imagine a common requirement regardless of your affiliation. Hoping V2 keeps that in tact regardless of the internal details. You do realize that if you continue in this folly that you will remove the only feature that qualifies this as a "Home" product.

I suggest removing the Home from the name, and just call it Windows Server If you intend to kill this product then just have the backbone to tell your until this point loyal and enthusiastic user base. You will alienate and confuse every other existing customer, and they will find non-Microsoft products to fill the void. If you don't care about the existing customer base Too small? I've never seen statistics Then at least have the backbone to just rename the damn product and distance yourself from WHS's original stated objectives, which are NOT fulfilled by your new plan.

I have had some problems with too vague error reporting from a failing drive in v1, so I was hoping v2 would just continue to make DE and other aspects more robust and user friendly. Instead, this is a major step backwards in consumer level viability, essentially removing the user friendly aspects of the OS and turning this into just another server operating system.

I'm so disappointed that its hard to concentrate. Why take such a good thing a spoil it so? Its practically the only Microsoft product I've seen people wowed by in the last 5 years.

That is, until I got my Windows Phone 7 which is excellent. I remember someone implying there were technical limitations to using the existing DE in v2, can anyone reiterate those? Karl, the Vail beta you already have will expire.

No question about that. When it expires, you will probably lose access to the data you have on your Vail server, most likely permanently because a future beta would almost certainly not have DE. I must say I'm disappointed. I have a couple of systems with RAID5, and if a drive dies, it will be rebuilt by the system.

If the system dies, the same system has to built, whether hardware or software, to access the data. How is this different from DE in Vail? I "killed" drives in Vail testing, and the system rebuilt the data pool, even though I killed a 1TB drive and replaced it with a 2TB drive.

I think people got spoiled by the DE in WHS v1, where the data are available outside the box, even though drive usage was far from balanced.

I've recommended WHS to family and friends, who know how to turn computers on and off, but if something goes wrong, they need help. I'm sure glad they announced this today. Saves the money I was about to drop on parts to build my homeserv2 for Vail.

They say how great this will be when, except for the multi TB video servers with lots of unduplicated movies, this is clearly not true.

I thought this WHS means exactly as it names?