The Release Candidate of Windows Home Server 2011 “Vail” is finally upon us. With this release, a new kind of home server is showing its colors – a version of Vail with Drive Extender ripped from its feature set. What does that mean to you and how does it affect your storage?
- No drive pooling. Each drive is a separate entity in the Windows Home Server 2011 ecosystem if one chooses not to use a RAID solution.
- No native selectable redundancy. If you wish to have data protection from the loss of a hard drive, you are going to have to look at a RAID solution.
- No mixing and matching of drives. If you go with a RAID configuration, you’ll need drives of exactly the same type and size to build your array.
For some of you, RAID is the only way to go. However, traditional RAID solutions require matched hard drives. If you have 1TB drives now, and you wish to upgrade to 2 or 3TB drives, all I can say is have fun. If you wish to experiment with non-traditional software RAID solutions that allow for mixed drives sizes, all I can say is have even more fun. My server serves the home, so stability is at the top of my list of desirable attributes in a RAID or DE-based system. While DE had some bumps along the way, the current incarnation of Drive Extender in Windows Home Server v1 meets my stability needs. As well as my need for flexibility. To put it mildly, I am quite sad to see it gone.
The Windows Home Server 2011 Storage Experience
So, what does Windows Home Server 2011 look like without Drive Extender? That’s right, with this release of Vail, the name of the OS appears to be official: Vail = Windows Home Server 2011.
Of course, there still appears to be a bit of confusion when you open the “About” window. We have Window Home Server Premium, Microsoft Windows Home Server, and Window Home Server 2011, all in one window.
Once the system is booted up, we need to open the Dashboard. For this demonstration, we’re using a VMware virtual machine installation of Windows Home Server 2011.
Next, we need to go to the Server Folders and Hard Drives tab section, where you will find the Server Folders as they look now:
and how they looked last April:
There is not a lot of change in the Shared Folder names, however, you will notice the loss of folder duplication as an option from the previous version to new. We now also have a physical drive location for each folder, and “Free space” monitor vs. “Used space”. Free space is a very important metric in the post-DE world.
Next, we move over to the Hard Drives tab. Once again, you will see differences from new
to old.
Most of these changes are in the area of designation where the Release Candidate refers to physical drives using the traditional C, D, etc. nomenclature, while the old preview version used the named drive convention due to the DE pooling that no longer exists.
















