6 replies to this topic

[nicodemus]

Hello All
Question has Any one use a hardware raid with WHS Vail. The reason I ask I have read so many forums on WHS vial . There are many who do not recommend using any type of raid on WHS vail. Can some explain Why. ???

[GaPony]

Microsoft doesn't recommend or support using RAID with WHS, at all. My guess is that the "new & unique" disk structure used by Vail makes using a RAID even more challenging. I've never felt the need for RAID with WHS v1 and as long as Vail has the 10 drive limit, I wouldn't bother with RAID on it either.

[Drashna Jaelre (WGS)]

Well, there are a good number of reasons RAID isn't supported or recommended.
A lot of people would use software RAID, which is positively destructing to WHSv1, and probably Vail.
And then there is a lack of good driver support. Both for installing to, and stability in the OS.

[mediadogg]

Well, there are a good number of reasons RAID isn't supported or recommended.
A lot of people would use software RAID, which is positively destructing to WHSv1, and probably Vail.
And then there is a lack of good driver support. Both for installing to, and stability in the OS.

Based on my experience with WHS2011 (see my "experiences" thread), I don't think the assertions of this thread are still true, or are they?

(1) My motherboard has HW RAID, and WHS seems to not care. It just sees the volume as a hard drive. Now, the motherboard vendor's software is another matter. It was not designed to install on WHS, so I had to coax it. The software is only needed to monitor the status of the array and to coordinate a rebuild if needed.

(2) In the other thread, I thought we concluded that not only does MS support RAID use with WHS 2011, but it is actually built-in to Server 2008 R2, and is not specifically precluded from use (MS could have disabled it in WHS).

So, what is the upshot? I admit that I am having System Backup issues, so maybe that's my answer. Maybe I should disable all the RAID stuff and see if the backup issues go away (although the RAID drives are not at all involved in the backup - I am neither using RAID on the system drive, nor on the USB attached backup drive).

[mediadogg]

Ok, well I will just continue this conversation with myself.

My conclusions and rationale about the use of RAID with WHS 2011 are:

(1) Use of RAID is not for the faint of heart, nor for beginners. The more experience you have, the better.
(2) Try to avoid using RAID on the boot drive. Not much benefit, but a bit of a pain to set up.
(3) Make sure you have the latest drivers and vendor application software, and that it is compatible with Server 2008.
(4) Keep in mind that no matter how large the RAID cluster, there is still a 2TB volume backup/restore limit. A larger volume will have to be handled in 2TB or less chunks, as a set of folders/files, and this may be slower because backup / restore uses a block copy method for whole volume operations.
(5) If you use Disk Management to partition RAID clusters, make sure that always have a system backup corresponding to your partition scheme. Otherwise, when you restore, your partions could be all messed up, with a potential for data loss.

My overall impression of WHS 2011 at this point is that it is not as robust overall as WHS V1. I have hit more unresolvable issues requiring a system restore during my testing than I have hit in a couple of years of using V1 in production. This may in part be due to my experimentation with RAID and using various disk management options. Things are stable at the moment, but I will run maybe a week more in test mode before starting data migration.

Here are some of my ideas anout how to use RAID and Disk Management: (Edited to reflect better info on Server Backup)

(1) HW RAID 1 for a 2TB mirrored volume for family photos, etc. This volume will also be backed up to a network share (probably WHS V1) periodically.
(2) Spanned volume for non-essential data, to cobble together a few small hard drives into 1TB or more. For example, for download folders. or other temporary use. If this gets broken or the data lost, it will not matter.
(3) Small HW RAID 5 cluster for a pool of large Video and Recorded TV files. The folders in this volume will be backed up to network shares in 2TB or less chunks.
(4) Remaining disks will either run singleton or SW mirrored, with all volumes backed up to network shares, if I can figure out how to script it.

For backing up to network shares, I will explore Robocopy, Beyond Compare, iSCSI and native Server 2008 Backup. The advantage of using Server 2008 is that I can get incremental (shadow copy - VSS) type backups. I just wish there were a nice GUI to set up the scripts and schedule, as there is for Server Backup. I don't why we are restriced to only one server backup schedule. I just found this article that includes info about using wbadmin scripts for backing up to network shares (but you give up VSS - volume shadow copy): Server 2008 Backup.

For the system volume backups, I have a small portable USB drive that fits snugly in the bottom of my server cabinet, attached to a spare USB header on the motherboard, using a little adapter. Backups are fast, and I don't have to worry about the drive becoming unplugged by accident. It only takes a couple of minutes to physically retrieve the drive if I need it, and I can just assign a drive letter to the drive it under Disk Manager and back up its contents to a network folder.

[Rychek]

This thread was initially discussing RAID in the context of a WHS v2 that included Drive Extender. Now that DE is dead for v2, RAID is "The Way". You've provided a useful list of points in regard to RAID. Anyone thinking about RAID who isn't familiar with it should at least be aware of those caveats.

[thebigred]

To be frank I don't think there's any techincal reason why you couldn't use either software or hardware RAID. When I say software, I mean the software RAID supported by 2008 R2

At the end of the day there's nothing "magic" about what Microsoft are doing with storage here, these drives are not even dynamic, just standard volumes running NTFS.

Personally my reasons for not using hardware RAID would be:

- Decent hardware RAID cards are not cheap, certainly not in the price bracket that most would want (or need) for home - be very very very very wary of cheap RAID cards, they are almost certainly software cards or the drivers will be awful - you want one from one of the big guys, adaptec, HP, etc etc
- Unless you're doing very simple mirroring in the event of a failure, withot a proper understanding of RAID or what's going on you can end up relying on it and actually wiping out all your data - you also need to consider the RAID level you'd run at, i'd personally not suggest 5 or 6 for WHS.
- RAID on low end systems is becoming less and less important, especially for home. I gave up on having a decent RAID array at home years ago, it's expensive and you can achieve the same thing using disk duplication or backups/snapshots with much more flexibility - in addition hard drives have become so much more reliable in recent years that i've personally seen a massive drop in the number of failures I've had

Software RAID:

- It's alright, sort of, but personally I wouldn't bother, you are still relying on the local processor and likely chewing up processor time. In addition at best you are relying on the O/S to protect your data, it could be the O/S that messes up and wipes out your data, if you're really desperate for RAID i'd go hardware.

My advice would be save your time and money, and do something like multiple disk backups or data duplication - unless you have some good knowledge and plenty of time and you want to play with RAID.

Anyway all just my opinion