Time to say goodbye.

[sam_roberts30]

So after years of running Unraid I'm leaving. The lure of server essentials 2012 is too great for me.

 

Anyway, I'd just like to say a huge thanks to every one has helped me out over the years and given me advice.

 

All the best with 5.0 when it's finalised.

[adammerkley]

Don't take this the wrong way please, but what about 2012 is luring you away?  Just curious.

[Tophicles]

Looks like a LOT of money...

 

http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/4/B/04BD0EB1-42FE-488B-919F-3981EF9B2101/WS2012_Licensing-Pricing_Datasheet.pdf

 

Not sure how this even remotely compares to the functionality set of unRAID, you're talking completely different architecture. unRAID (at it's core) is not a server environment, it's a NAS with some plugins. Given that the lowest cost for 2012 is over $500 it seems a little ridiculous. It looks like a re-brand of SBS and most sys admins I know shudder at those three letters

 

Km

[c3]

Essentials is basically SBS, and like SBS can be purchased for far less than Microsoft list price.

 

Feature wise, Storage Spaces (also part of Windows 8, about the same price as Essentials) includes Hot Spare, Auto Rebuild, and multiple redundancy levels. Support wise, a massive support organization, and massive hardware support.

 

I think it is a reasonable debate and would not fault the OP's choice. As you said, unRAID is a NAS with some plugins, not a server environment.

[garycase]

... The lure of server essentials 2012 is too great for me.

 

It would be interesting to know which features contributed to the "lure" that attracted you away.  Are you using software RAID with 2012, or do you have a hardware controller?

 

Have you had specific problems with your UnRAID box that motivated this switch?    ... or was it just frustration with the development cycle?  ... specific features you'll gain?  ... the Microsoft support infrastructure?  ... etc.

 

Not questioning the move at all ... just curious what the factors were that contributed to your decision.

 

[SidebandSamurai]

Essentials is basically SBS, and like SBS can be purchased for far less than Microsoft list price.

 

Feature wise, Storage Spaces (also part of Windows 8, about the same price as Essentials) includes Hot Spare, Auto Rebuild, and multiple redundancy levels. Support wise, a massive support organization, and massive hardware support.

 

I think it is a reasonable debate and would not fault the OP's choice. As you said, unRAID is a NAS with some plugins, not a server environment.

 

um question teacher ... the Hot Spare, Auto Rebuild, and Multiple redundancy levels, aren't they all part of a RAID controller? 

 

--Sideband Samurai

[sam_roberts30]

Basically I got sever 2012 through work and the features like client back up, enterprise level tech support, dhcp/DNS servers, active director directory services, vpn etc (things that unraid just can't do) are what pulled me away.

 

In reality, the server functions of 2012 are spectacular but as a media server it's pretty poor.

 

I have now esxi'd the whole shabang. Server 2012 for the server features and unraid for the media. Truth be told, I only went away from unraid because I had a major failiure which gave me the opportunity to start from scratch, not have to move any data around plus I got to try server 2012 in the home environment with no cost.

[Influencer]

So not really a goodbye but a Move over

[tr0910]

So not really a goodbye but a Move over

 

Features like High Availability failover for unRaid would be nice.  Guessing that would cost a bundle with Microsoft though..

[garycase]

As I read this, it's not goodbye at all => you're still an "UnRAIDer" ... just one with ESXi -- and you also happen to have Server 2012 installed in another VM on the same physical system 

 

[sam_roberts30]

Yeah, I'm in the process of rebuilding the Unraid (see my other thread as to why). I did intend to just use server 2012 but as with most things in life, what they promised isn't what they delivered.

 

But you have to try these things and now I have the best of both worlds.

[drawz]

Curious to know what issues you ran into? WS2012E with Storage Pools and a combination of parity and mirrored Storage Spaces sounds very appealing - parity for the replaceable things, like media; mirrored for the irreplaceable things, like documents and photos. The client backup features are just icing on the cake (and these worked great in WHS v1 for me).

[garycase]

Agree that WS2012 sounds very appealing => the Storage Pools in particular.    I'm too cheap to build another whole server just to try it ... but maybe Santa will bring me some new hardware this year 

[sam_roberts30]

It just didn't work properly. It would unmount drives at random and you would have to rebuild the entire pool again, it doesn't write in a sensible manor. I mean had a 3tb test pool (3x1tb) and you fill them up to 75%, added a 4th and carried on filling them. It carried on writing to the original 3tb and when it was full it said I had no space even though there was 3/4 of the 4th drive free. Also there area MASSIVE overheads, you don't really notice on the bigger drives but on the smaller drives you can loose like 10% to the overhead.

 

You can't add parity at a later date, it is very difficult to remove a drive from the pool without replacing it..... Honestly the best thing to do if you want to hear about storage spaces is to head over to another well known server forum that is very much windows biased (I'm not sure if I'm allowed to link to other website or not) or just google it, there are thousands of horror stories about how bad storage spaces is.

 

Like I said, the server functions like active directory director services, HDCP and DNS services, print server, VPN etc (I'm now using standard server 2012 not essentials) are phenomenal and are super easy to set up. I really can't rate it highly enough apart from the storage spaces. I am using it for client backup using hardware raid 1, again, super smooth and once setup runs very smoothly.

 

The other factor I found to be a pain in the hoop was the fact that all the drives are spun up if accessing any data. Not good when you start getting more and more drives. For that reason I will hold my hands up and say that I should have never dropped Unraid for media storage. As my old hockey coach used to say "the grass is only greener if it's fuelled on bullsh1t"

 

If you have a virtualised environment i would defiantly recommend ws2012 and unraid as a complete solution. You kinda have to remember that it isn't a home server and is fundamentally designed for businesses. I know a few guys who run essentials a drive pool and rave about it but, for me, it isn't the right fit.

[drawz]

Thanks for the feedback. I have read some of the horror stories, but most seemed to be in the setting of artificial tests, often with virtualized disks for the purposes of these tests. In addition, a lot of the stories are from almost a year ago now and I would think MS has fixed some of the issues. Further, 2012 R2 is now out, although I haven't seen much feedback on that release.

 

As for spindown, my understanding is that drives in a space should be able to spindown if they are not being accessed. If a file is open, the fact that the data is striped means all drives will be spun up, just like any traditional RAID (as well as most other RAID-like solutions). Drives not in the space being accessed should remain spun down though. This potentially gets interesting since multiple spaces of different configurations can co-exist within a given storage pool (i think). This component of unRAID is certainly appealing for media purposes. More importantly, individual drives can be pulled and read with unRAID since they are not striped.

 

I don't think there is any issue linking to another forum if you don't mind doing so.

[sam_roberts30]

It is much better after r2 but still not reliable enough to be deemed a reliable solution in my mind. There are addons which would be suitable, like drive pool, but they aren't good enough for my system.

 

The spin down does work in the sense that when the pool isnt accessed they do spin down but if you access the pool all the drives in the pool spin up (at least that's what was happening for me).

 

Go over to wegotserved.com (sorry mods if I'm not allowed to link. Please edit if you need to) and ask about storage spaces. Even with r2 people are getting bad results.

[drawz]

Having all the drives in a storage space spin up is expected behavior - it's necessary by the nature of being striped since the data for a single file is spread across disks. This should be a performance advantage since the data is coming off multiple drives in parallel. On the other hand, unRAID's setup without striping allows individual drives to spin up or be removed from the array and still be readable.

 

I did visit that forum and was unimpressed by the relatively small number of bad experiences. In fact, there weren't that many experiences overall and many of them seemed to be based on hearsay, jumping on the band wagon, or simply based on old information (ie immediately after WS2012 release a year ago).

 

I'm still tempted to give it a try with a few spare drives. It does sound like there are some limitations, but every solution has limitations or we'd all be using the same setup.

[sam_roberts30]

I know it's expected behaviour, just not the behaviour I wanted. Maybe it's because of using unraid but it bugs me that 10 drives spinning up to watch one movie, it just seems like a bit of a waste of power.

 

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad system, far from it. The tech support is fantastic, the features are plentiful and useful but the storage spaces didn't fit for me. I'm still using ws2012 for a lot of things, just not media storage, for me unraid does a much better job for that. The people at wgs who like windows server, like me, but they recommended using drive pool or drive bender as apposed to storage spaces as they are more reliable and more practical. The thing is there is real actively few people with wse2012 so the ratio of the amount of people who had problems:people who have wse2012 is quite high.

 

All the comments I have made are based my opinions about my experiences on my network. You might have more success than I did. I would definately try it, it is a huge step forward from windows home server and has so many tricks up it's leave it's hard not to be impressed. Just don't put faith in storage spaces until you have tested it thoroughly.

 

The one thing I do like about the storage space design is you can pull it from your windows server and drop it straight into a windows 8 machine. Maybe it's because of my recent need for data recovery but anything that aids recovery is welcome in my book!

[drawz]

It's always hard to know what's really going on when the sample size is small. And as usual with the internet, those with problems tend to be more vocal. I still don't see much feedback from those that tried it after MS had the opportunity to fix bugs and even fewer with R2. If your biggest complaint is the spin up/down issue, I think I can live with that because I will likely stick to only 3-4 drives.

 

Like I said, I think I'll give it a try, possibly keeping unRAID around for media and WS2012E for backups and other server duties. Your virtualized solution is interesting, but I don't think it's one I'm willing to tackle right now.