Add-In Review: WHS Disk Management

Depending on what you want WHS to do, you will hopefully be able to find a WHS add-in to help get you there.  Regardless of any specific needs, there are a few must-have add-ins that you should have installed for general use in WHS.  WHS Disk Management is one such add-in.

What is WHS Disk Management?  As they say, a picture is worth a 1000 words.  In this case, 2 pictures.  The 1st picture shows the Server Storage tab that is part of the basic WHS installation.  The second picture shows the WHS Disk Management tab that I am reviewing today. 

I am sure that you can tell the huge difference in information that is presented in each tab.  Server Storage has only very basic information, while Disk Management provides not only similar basic information but includes individual disk statistics as well a very nice graphical picture of your physical configuration.  If you want more detailed information on a particular hard drive, simply highlight it and click on the Details button.  This will bring up a new window and provide you with more information than you perhaps care to know, as seen below.  You can also add or remove drives from the pool in Disk Management, just like you can in Server Storage.

Let’s get back to the graphical portion of this add-in.  Disk Management is not smart enough to make that pretty picture itself (perhaps in a future release!), but it is a relatively straightforward exercise to produce, as illustrated in the following pictures.

First, click on the Settings icon in the top right corner.  This will bring up a window as shown below.

From here, you can Create New Wireframe or Edit Current Wireframe.  If you click on the Data Collection tab, you can change how Disk Management presents information to you, as can be seen below.

Getting back to the Server Wireframe tab, click on the Create New Wireframe button.  Disk Management will present a series of screens to help you configure a model of your physical computer and placement of your hard drives in that model.  This will bring up a new window, seen below.  I always click on the Advanced Mode option, just in case I need it.

This is a wizard-type setup, so simply click on the arrows, enter your information, and place your model as desired to go through the Create process.  The process is illustrated as follows.

Pick what kind of Drive Bay you have.

Position and rotate the bay so that it is presented how it physically looks.

 Add your hard drives, or other non-hard drives bays.

Confirm your additions.  You can name your drives, if so desired, here. 

If you are done, click the OK button. 

If you like everything you see here, click on the OK button and you will have the same type of information you saw displayed in the picture of my setup at the beginning of this review.

That is all there is to it.  If you misplaced a drive, or need to edit placement, simply click on the Edit Current Wireframe to take you through a similar set of wizard screens.

One option that is not part of the wizard screens is the ability to change various component colors.  I’m not a fan of the default colors that the author (Sam Wood, MVP) creates, so I changed them to suit my sense of color.  This requires one to directly edit the whsdiskmgt.serverwireframe.xml file that is created by Disk Management to describe your specific wireframe.  It requires you to use valid HTML RGB codes or color names, and edit/save it with Notepad in UTF-8.  If you feel comfortable editing this file, it is not too difficult to do so.  Hopefully, in a future release, color options will become part of the wizard.

As I said in the beginning, there are a few must-have add-ins that you should have installed for general use in WHS.  WHS Disk Management is one such add-in, and one of my favorites.

Author: Sam Wood
Version Reviewed: 1.1.0.0 Beta
Release Date: late 2008/early 2009?

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