A New Kind of Home Computer: Windows Home Server Preview
by Ryan Smith on September 4, 2007 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
WHS as a File and Media Server
The second major feature Microsoft is pushing with WHS is its use as a file and media server. This is a natural ability for WHS to have since file serving is a core component of Windows Server 2003, and we couldn't imagine Microsoft having not shipped WHS with this feature. As we'll see however, for a file server WHS is surprisingly hit and miss.
It's important to note that the connector software is not only a backup client, but it integrates the computer into the server on an account and file level. WHS does not do active directory domains (important because home versions of Windows can't connect to those) but instead offers a simpler level of integration. When a client is integrated into the server, the default action is to create accounts on the server that are related to the accounts on the client. Here WHS and the connector will copy over the account names and passwords (forcing the account owner to set a real password if they are not using one) and then give every account their own personal folder on the server. WHS will furthermore keep the accounts in sync between the client and the server, so that passwords remain the same on both, particularly important so that clients can access the server's folders without needing to log into the server separately.
By giving each account on each client a server account, this serves to simplify access controls on the server. WHS forgoes the full abilities of Windows' access control lists for a Unix-like read-write/read/none level of permissions for each shared folder for each account. Permissions can only be set at the shared folder level however, and subfolders can only inherit the permissions of the folder that contains them unless the administrator goes outside the bounds of the WHS console.
Besides the account folders, WHS comes with five public folders: music, videos, photos, public, and software, and all accounts automatically get read-write access to these folders. Additional folders can easily be created from the console, with accounts getting no permissions by default. The much loathed guest account also makes an appearance here, and while it's disabled by default it's possible to enable it and give it access rights to all the shared folders the same as any other account.
It's also with the shared folders that the folder duplication feature becomes available. Windows doesn't duplicate backup data (since the data is already at one place: the client) but can duplicate any of the shared folders, including the account folders. From having used WHS so far, the ability to select what folders to duplicate (e.g. photos but not videos) is proving to be incredibly useful.
WHS also offers a degree of local backup protection for these shared folders, besides the redundancy in case of a drive failure. Surprisingly, none of Microsoft's own manuals for WHS mention this, but the shadow copy service on WHS is by default used to also track changes in shared documents, meaning the Previous Versions feature is available to recover old documents should the current ones be damaged/destroyed. This currently is somewhat limited in availability since on the client side only Vista and some XP clients support this feature, but via RDP it's possible to log into the server, which can also use the Previous Versions feature on itself. The buffer for the amount of data shadowed here is fairly small, so these backups are not as robust as the backups done by WHS of whole computers. But since most media seldom changes, it's enough to recover files in the most likely situations.
Finally, all of these shares are offered as a normal Windows SMB share. This is worth noting since there are viable SMB clients available for all the major platforms, so WHS can easily be used as a server even in a mixed network. Furthermore the WHS development team has also been looking at other uses for the shared folders, going so far as to seriously propose using a WHS server as a back end for Mac OS X Leopard's Time Machine backups.
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ATWindsor - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
All NAS-boxes have horrible performance. (at least all I have seen). It hardly seems fair to use benchmarks from them, when this is a "Proper" computer, there are plenty of benchmarks from software raid 5 run on "real" computers to find, see this for instance:http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/19/using_windo...">http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/11/19/...appen/pa...
MDADM is as far as i know even faster, hower for whs it would likely be built on the software-raid of win2003.
Gholam - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
All NAS-boxes have horrible performance.Wrong. Proper NAS boxes have superb performance. Look at NetApp FAS270 for example. Of course a FAS270 in a typical configuration will run you in the $20,000-30,000 range.
That Tom's Hardware test is running a 2.8GHz CPU. http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/121499/tranquil-t7h...">This WHS box is running a 1.3GHz VIA C7, for example.
Also, WHS is designed to be easily and transparently expandable by end-user using external drives. Please show me a RAID setup of any kind that will work in a mixed ATA/SATA/USB/FireWire configuration with drives of varying sizes.
ATWindsor - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
Ok, all consumer NAS-boxes then, I thought that much was implicit. It doesn't matter anyway, the point is that your comparison to a box like that isn't very good when it comes to "proving" that software-raid automatically has bad performance.A lot of boxes with WHS will be using a CPU that is better than a 1.3 Via, if the hardware isn't suited for the job, then you just don't run a software raid5, it's that easy.
I don't see how the WHS storage-pool is incompatible with raid as a concept, a raid-array presents itself as a single drive, more or less, wich can be merged into the storagepool if one feels like it.
Gholam - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ is a consumer level NAS. However, it's built on an SBC running a 1.4GHz Celeron M ULV, and in actual testing outperforms many self-built systems. On the other hand, it also costs over $1000 without drives.ATWindsor - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
The benches I have seen points to a read-performance of 30 MB/s give or take lets say 10 MB, thats hardly good performance, it doesn't even outperform a single drive. One can easily build a software raid with several times better speed.Gholam - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
WHS is made to run on low-power, low-end and old hardware; calculating parity blocks in software is bad enough on a modern desktop CPU, an old PIII/800 or a VIA C3/C7 (present in some OEM WHS box implementations) will get murdered.In addition, recovering data from a failed RAID5 array is quite difficult, requiring specialized (and expensive) software as well as user expertise. Recovering data from a failed WHS box with duplication is as simple as mounting the drives separately.
ATWindsor - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
The raid will not fail before two drives goes down, if that happens in WHS, you still need to run recovery-software and hope to get out data. WHS will be run on diffrent kinds of systems, even the cheapest of CPUs today are pretty powerful. More than powerful enough to get reasonable spped on raid5. Why limit WHS in this way? That is exactly the problem I'm adressing, the lack of flexibility, the reasoning that all WHS-users have the same needs, I think a pretty large number of WHS-machines wich poeple build themself will have performance several times higher then a P3@800, if not most.Gholam - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
The raid will not fail before two drives goes downOh how I WISH that was true. Let me give you a recent example I've dealt with. HP/Compaq ProLiant ML370G2 with SmartArray something (641? don't remember) running a 4x36 RAID5 array, Novell Netware 5.0. DLT VS80 tape backup drive. Worked for 4 years or so, then the tape died. Took the organization in question 4 months to buy a new one, LTO-2 - which means they've had 4 months without backups. Downed the server, connected the new tape, booted - oops, doesn't boot. Their "IT guy", in his infinite wisdom, connected the tape to the RAID controller, instead of onboard SCSI - which nuked the array. It didn't go anywhere, the controller didn't even report any errors, but NWFS crashed hard. They ended up rolling back to 4 months old backups because pulling data out of a corrupt RAID5 array would've cost several thousands.
I work for a small company that specializes in IT outsourcing for small and medium businesses - basically shops that are too small to afford a dedicated IT department, and we give them the entire solution: hardware, software, installation, integration, advisory, support, etc - and I've got many stories such as this one. We also deal with home users, but not as much.
This said, I don't consider RAID5 a suitable for home use, at least not yet. It's too expensive and dangerous - mirroring files across a bunch of drives is cheaper and easier. Also, as far as I understand, when a drive in WHS drive pool fails, it automatically syncs protected folders into free space on remaining drives, so the window where your data is vulnerable is quite small. RAID5, on the other hand, will be vulnerable until you replace the drive (which can take days or even weeks) and then until it finishes rebuilding (which can also take a very long time on a large array). You can keep a hotspare, but then you'll be eating up another drive - in case of 4 drives, RAID5+hotspare eats you the same 50% as RAID1/RAID10 - while WHS mirroring makes your entire free space function as hot spare.
ATWindsor - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
Hardly a very plausible scenario for a home user, of course a RAID can go down if you mess it up, but you can just as easily mess up non-raided drives to the point that running recovery-software is needed, when it comes to normal drive-failiures two of them have to die.If you only need 2 Drives worth of storage, you might as well mirror, but when you need for instance 10, it adds up, but drive-cost, electricity PSU-size and physical size (especially if you want a backuo-machine in adition, I would never keep my data on only one computer like that). If the syncing is going to work,you also need to have at least a disk of usalble free space, so you basically need to "waste" a whole disk on that to if you wnat to get hot-spare-functionality.
Gholam - Monday, September 10, 2007 - link
Hardly a very plausible scenario for a home user, of course a RAID can go down if you mess it up, but you can just as easily mess up non-raided drives to the point that running recovery-software is needed, when it comes to normal drive-failiures two of them have to die.Not quite. WHS balances data between drives, so if one of them becomes corrupt and one of the copies of your protected data is gone, you can still access it on the other - no extra tools required, just mount the drive in a Windows system. You will only lose it if both drives become corrupt simultaneously.
If the syncing is going to work,you also need to have at least a disk of usalble free space, so you basically need to "waste" a whole disk on that to if you wnat to get hot-spare-functionality.
Again, not quite. Since you protect the data on a per-folder basis, your free space requirement depends on the actual amount of data you're keeping redundant, not the total, and there's little point in wasting redundant storage on backups - they're redundancy in and of themselves.