WHS v2 - Vail Released to Public View.

[RebateMonger]

Just to get a bit more exciting, Windows Virtual PC/ XP Mode in Windows 7 has some USB support, although I'm not sure if a tuner would work.

I think it's only useful for mass storage, but I'm not 100% sure.

I had a bad first experience with the USB support in Win7's XP Mode. I inserted a USB memory stick, and copied a single file to it from the virtualized XP. Then I "Safely Removed" the USB stick, pulled it out....and Win7 rebooted, never to boot again!

This was a one-week-old clean Win7 installation that hadn't exhibited a single problem.

The damage was probably related to some weird interaction with a second PCI-E video card I'd just installed the day before. When I removed that second video card, I was able to boot my system. That same second video card had "trashed" a stable Vista installation on another motherboard the week before.

But I'm now afraid to hook another USB stick with Win7's Virtual XP Mode!

 

[ViRGE]

It depends. If it's a PCI or PCI-E tuner, then, no.

If it's a USB tuner, then, maybe. Some higher-level virtualization software (like VMWare Server) can read USB ports. But that might be only for mass storage, and not for something like a TV tuner. Low-level virtualization software, like ESX or Hyper-V can't read USB.

VMWare Workstation/Server can shunt any USB device to the VM, not just mass storage. So a USB tuner should work with it. I haven't tried VirtualBox, so I don't know what its USB capabilities are.

In any case, if the USB route fails, a networked tuner like the HDHomeRun would definitely work.

So theoretically, with a bit of hacking, one could have their cake and eat it too here?

Assuming they had the proper hardware, install vail on a reasonably powerful server. Run Win7 in a VM, with a USB tuner for WMC. Vail does it's server thing, Win7 does it's media center thing, and one could then theoretically use the xbox 360 as an extender?

Would the Win7 in the VM be able to locally access the server shares?

Correct. As long as you were using a bridged networking mode (so the VM got a real IP address and unrestricted access to the LAN) then that would work.

 

[Jeff7181]

Just got this installed this evening. Running on a $300 box (barebones deal from newegg.com, dual core Celeron, 2 GB RAM, 1 TB hard drive) and I had a hell of a time getting it installed. I attempted once on the brand new WD Green hard drive I bought, got errors and then learned that it doesn't play nice with WD's "Advanced Format" drives so I swapped with my old WD Green drive and still got errors during the install. Swapped an older 80 GB WD drive and learned of the 160 GB hard disk minimum. Swapped the older 1 TB WD Green drive in and tried again - more errors during install. Tried once last time to install via USB rather than DVD and it worked. The box is now in the corner with a power cord and patch cord plugged into it running along nicely on my gigabit LAN. Got the Connector software installed on my Win7 desktop and laptop and I'm able to copy files to and from with ease. Transfer rates are pretty damn good. Took 10 minutes to copy 40 GB of video files to it from my desktop.

Haven't run a backup on any computers yet... that'll happen tonight.

Pretty sure I'm going to buy this when it's released - I enjoyed the convenience of the first WHS beta I participated in, but didn't feel it was worth the money given the file corruption issues so many people had. Apparently that's resolved with this version.

*EDIT* By the way, while I still had my monitor hooked up, I noticed the memory usage was about 1.6 GB while basically sitting idle. Makes me wonder if this can benefit much from increasing from 2 to 4 GB and how poorly it would perform with 1 GB.

 

[notposting]

Well, just as a point of caution Jeff:

the file corruption got resolved in WHS PP1 (it's up to PP3 now);
no one noticed it during the extended beta for it;

they have completely changed everything up for Vail so there may be problems that no one knows about yet in it as well

But if you don't have a WHS v1 I definitely wouldn't buy one now. Just take the plunge and get the kinks worked out of Vail so I can buy it when it hits PP1 itself

 

[Jeff7181]

Yeah... I'm not putting anything on the server that I don't already have on both my other computers (and backed up on a hard drive that only gets plugged in to perform backups). It's very convenient though.

 

[RebateMonger]

But if you don't have a WHS v1 I definitely wouldn't buy one now. Just take the plunge and get the kinks worked out of Vail so I can buy it when it hits PP1 itself

Many people won't be doing anything with WHS that would take significant advantage of WHS2 over WHS1. And if they wait for PP1 of WHS2, they'll be waiting for a while. The WHS Program Manger said they expect active changes in WHS2 for months in the future.

 

[ViRGE]

Many people won't be doing anything with WHS that would take significant advantage of WHS2 over WHS1. And if they wait for PP1 of WHS2, they'll be waiting for a while. The WHS Program Manger said they expect active changes in WHS2 for months in the future.

We don't even know when WHS v2 is going gold, do we? MS is tiptoeing around the issue, as if they don't think it'll come out this year.

 

[Jeff7181]

We don't even know when WHS v2 is going gold, do we? MS is tiptoeing around the issue, as if they don't think it'll come out this year.

I'd be shocked if it did. If you read the forums there are a bunch of issues they're working on and they're taking suggestions for features or abilities that should be added. They also haven't even included all the features in this beta that will be in the final product. I expect another big public beta and then a few more months minimum while they gather data from the second beta before it goes gold.

 

[RebateMonger]

Haven't run a backup on any computers yet... that'll happen tonight.

I started backing up a virtual Win7 Home Premium machine (hosted in Virtual PC on my Win7 Ultimate desktop) the day that WHS V2 was released. I've got several manual and automatic backups so far.

Tonight I did a couple of restores of the virtual Win7 Home Premium to a new virtual hard disk. Everything went fine except that the first restore took a LOT longer than expected. It must have taken 15 minutes to restore the 100 MB "System Reserved" partition plus the main 20 GB partition. This was across a (not very optimized) 1 Gigabit network to virtualized Windows Home Servers on a Hyper-V server. Note that the 20 GB partition only includes about 5 GB of actual data (the size of the Win7 OS).

I did the restore a second time without reformatting the two partitions. WHS wrote the restore right on top of the first restore. This time it took five minutes to restore the whole PC. This is in line with restores from the Win7 System Imaging backup, from a WHS V1 backup, and from a Clonezilla backup. I don't kow what's up with that first long restore.

Edit: I repeated that first restoration to an "empty" virtual disk, and it took seven minutes to restore the 20 GB system. I don't know why my first try was so slow.

 

[Jeff7181]

Automated backups happened last night. Kinda surprised my laptop finished. Previously I wasn't even getting 2 MB/sec transfer rates (802.11g) to the server and I have over 100 GB of data to back up.

 

[pjkenned]

attempted once on the brand new WD Green hard drive I bought, got errors and then learned that it doesn't play nice with WD's "Advanced Format" drives so I swapped with my old WD Green drive and still got errors during the install. Swapped an older 80 GB WD drive and learned of the 160 GB hard disk minimum. Swapped the older 1 TB WD Green drive in and tried again

I have 8x 1.5TB Greens... and have 2x 2.0TB EARS Greens en route ($109 @ newegg... I couldn't resist). I still have a feeling... that there's a pattern with greens. "They are great they save power" but I really think that they are sub-par drives. I'm at over 20TB of Hitachi installed on my home server and 0 issues thus far. Greens... I've had considerably less luck with. Sample sizes are small... but it seems like Greens tend to have more quirks.

 

[Jeff7181]

I buy WD because I've had the fewest problems with them. I've only had one WD drive die on me.

 

[JackMDS]

Might be of interest.

http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2010/05/installing-windows-home-server-vail.html

http://www.wegotserved.com/2010/05/08/introduction-to-windows-home-server-vail-sdk-dashboard/

http://www.wegotserved.com/2010/05/09/how-to-install-php-on-windows-home-server-vail/