Life is too short not to exact a bitter and bloody revenge
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Microsoft releases Windows Home Server 2011
SOFTWARE FLOGGER Microsoft has released Windows Home Server (WHS) 2011.
Microsoft has revealed that its engineering team signed off on the release of WHS 2011. This means that MSDN and Technet subscribers will be able to get their hands on WHS 2011 in early April.
Microsoft's WHS 2011 is the second version of WHS, which was first released in 2007 and generally well received. However Microsoft raised the ire of users when it announced that it was dropping the popular Drive Extender feature in the 2011 release.
Microsoft has claimed that many original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and system builders have been beavering away designing boxes based around WHS 2011, even without the Drive Extender feature. Microsoft says that users can expect the first machines in stores from May.
Microsoft has argued that as hard drive capacity has grown, the need to 'extend' volume capacity has become less important. While existing users might not agree with that sentiment, the Vole hopes that buyers won't care when faced with machines that come with up to 3TB of data storage capacity.
For Microsoft, WHS has been something of a success on all fronts, with some impressive system designs to back up Microsoft's coding efforts. While WHS might not rival Linux boxes in terms of overall functionality and cost, it is easy to set up and generally easy to manage in a plug and forget sort of way, which is something that's not generally associated with Windows machines.
With WHS 2011, Microsoft hopes that OEMs and system builders will be able to sell systems by designing machines that users will want to buy. µ
Tags: Microsoft
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My bet is that 6 months later or so Microsoft will come out a patch you can buy that will re-enable drive extender. Why drop a feature that people are currently using? It's all about the money.
I've never quite understood why the need for WHS myself, but then again as an avid Linux user I'm probably a bit biased on that. There isn't a task that I needed my home server to do that Linux couldn't deliver for free. I find the controller independent software raid a very nice feature that leaves just about any upgrade path I want to take open to me. I've presently got 11TB in raid 6, and it's wonderful.
The missing drive extender feature is not a problem. There are at least two companies that make a better product than DE ever was. Look for Drive Bender now in beta (v. 1.1.2.1). Another good product is StableBit DrivePool (beta v1.0.0.498), very easy to use, simply does what DE did. Pools multiple physical drives into one virtual drive and provides file duplication on a folder level.
I have 12.5TB of storage in my WHSv1. Drive extender works brilliantly in v1, but there is no AHCI support, no 64 bit support and a few other bits that hampers is future proofness.
WHS2011 addresses these lesser issues but ditched the most impressive feature of WHS: Drive Extender.
Without it I'm not going to upgrade, I'll have to map 8 drives for every machine on my home network in order to access the content. I know this isn't such a massive deal but spreading my film collection across multiple drive letters makes for a bit of a headache.
Plus no file duplication which was one of the most awesome features of WHSv1.
I'll skip this version and wait for a 3rd party drive extender to be released.