Windows Server 2012 Essentials: Experiences and Observations

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hoorah

Senior member
Dec 8, 2005
755
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First, just wanted to say thanks for the detailed writeup. I've been on the fence myself about what to do for my NAS and if I can bill some of the cost to a few customers I backup data for I would like to make the jump to 2012e myself.

As someone thats a bit inexperienced in dealing with Windows Servers, I may be asking an obvious question, but have you setup any VPN options in 2012E? Is this an included feature?

What I'd like to do is have my offsite WHS2011 box VPN into my server box to do a backup. I was/am using hamachi for this, but with recent updates hamachi can only be used interactively (not as a service) so it only works if I'm RDPd into both boxes.
 

ViRGE

Elite Member, Moderator Emeritus
Oct 9, 1999
31,516
167
106
As someone thats a bit inexperienced in dealing with Windows Servers, I may be asking an obvious question, but have you setup any VPN options in 2012E? Is this an included feature?

What I'd like to do is have my offsite WHS2011 box VPN into my server box to do a backup. I was/am using hamachi for this, but with recent updates hamachi can only be used interactively (not as a service) so it only works if I'm RDPd into both boxes.
Yes, VPN features are included. However I have never used them, so I can't give you any meaningful insight into how well they work.
 

AndyD2k

Senior member
Feb 3, 2003
824
0
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Hi thanks for such a detailed write up. Very helpful. I wanted to ask a question about the server. Does the server need to be always on because of the domain setup? Or can you log in locally on clients and use as normal? With WHS, the server could be asleep till needed but not sure how it would work with Server Essentials
 

ViRGE

Elite Member, Moderator Emeritus
Oct 9, 1999
31,516
167
106
You don't have to use the domain functionality; it's possible to join the clients to the server for backup purposes without joining them to the domain. As such it should be possible to sleep the server in this instance.
 

Dahak

Diamond Member
Mar 2, 2000
3,752
25
91
The instructions to do it are available Here

Skip down to the "Skipping the domain sign-in" but basically you just run the following from a command prompt

Code:
reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Server\ClientDeployment" /v SkipDomainJoin /t REG_DWORD /d 1

and then run the normal connect method to add the computer to the server
 

AndyD2k

Senior member
Feb 3, 2003
824
0
71
Thank you guys! If I were to use a domain setup, I would have to leave the server on?
 

glugglug

Diamond Member
Jun 9, 2002
5,340
1
81
As a side effect of the drive pooling being removed in WHS2011, a lot of 3rd party utilities cropped up to fill the gap, some of them quite good, like DriveBender, FlexRAID, and StableBit DrivePool.

I am now using StableBit DrivePool, and am quite happy with it. It stores whole files on NTFS volumes like the old WHS, with the same directory structure as the logical pooled drive, just in a hidden folder. So if you have 4 drives with a replication setting of 2, you might have 1 file duplicated on drives 1 and 2, another file duplicated on 3 and 4, another on 2 and 3, etc. So if your server were to crash, the drives could be popped in another machine and folders copied out & merged from each drive easily. The duplication level can be adjusted on a per-directory basis (for example I turned off duplication on the live TV buffer directory and syncron temp directory).

I removed the drive letters from the drives being used for the pool, and it runs fine like this, including nightly defrag.

I've seen mostly negative reviews of Storage Spaces performance -- the performance of DrivePool is quite impressive, especially with the recent feature to stripe reads across drives for a single mirrored file. I have seen files get read and scanned for commercials on my whole-home DVR at over 150MB/s, using 4 WD Red 4TB drives with a duplication level of 2, for an effective 8TB capacity. Decompressing large archives of tiny files in the pool is ridiculously fast. The only time I've seen the pool performance not be SSD-like is when opening a directory with over 1500 files in explorer and waiting for it to change the sort or update all the icons.

You can get the StableBit Scanner bundled with Drivepool, and it is a pretty nice SMART monitor and background scanner for bad clusters, with the ability to e-mail/page you if it looks like a drive needs replacing soon. This will tell you the serial number of the failed drive, so it is easy to identify even when you have a bunch of identical drives in the pool.

The only downside I see with DrivePool is that hard links and junctions are not currently supported, and that there is no option for parity drive(s) instead of mirroring. (Flexible parity seems to be the forte of FlexRAID). I think the mirroring will end up with far better write performance than parity though.