otispresley

Well, I really have 25 drives. 4 are SSDs sitting inside the case (1 SSD for the OS and 3 in a RAID0 for VM storage), one is in a drive dock for backups, and the 20 in hot swap bays are in DrivePool. 9 of my drives are still 3TB and 11 are 6TB. Once I get one more 6TB, I do plan to start a RAID50 and expand it over time as I upgrade the remaining 3TB drives.

I was just wondering if you guys have given any thought toward developing and offering a NAS-type product based on Windows Nano Server (assuming it works out with licensing)? You could include DrivePool, Scanner, CloutDrive, and any future products on it as the trial versions and sell licenses as you do now.
 
Of course, it would have to be remote GUI or have a web UI. This would also be a good platform for doing some media things with something like Emby. It would be really light-weight and easy to maintain, and it can be installed on a physical box or as a VM.

Wow! How do you ever find anything to watch? 

I encoded all of mine to HEVC video in an MKV container with no perceptible loss in quality. Choosing MKV was due to a bug with FFMPEG and copying PGS subtitles as binary data in the M2TS container. BUT, MKV does not support LPCM audio, so I had to convert those tracks to PCM at whatever bit depth and endian the source had. Overall, it resulted in just over 50% space savings. Here is what I have using less than 24 TB on the pool and being served by Emby:
Movies Episodes unkown 0 0 < 480P 0 0 480P 149 39 720P 0 24 1080P 1889 236 1440P 0 0 4K 0 0

@aron, you will be better off getting support in the VMware forums as we are not ESXi experts here, and this has nothing to do with Stablebit products.  What I do know is that the command you have issued is a list of partitions, so this is one device with 8 partitions on it and is the disk you have ESXi installed on.  It could be that your other disks are not partitioned and formatted yet or your controller is not presenting the disks properly...not really sure.  I see that your controller does appear on the compatibility list, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SMART data is supported for it in the product.

I can confirm that this issues is now fixed for me in the newest beta. Both drives are now reporting Healthy after a rescan.

LOL! Nobody even uses it anymore since I stopped playing all the MMORPG games. I don't know why I am still keeping it around.
 
 
Yes, this is certainly possible. You will have to allow VPN passthrough at your router in order to do it, and you will need to enable split tunneling so all the servers traffic doesn't go across the tunnel. My router supports site-to-site VPN, so I just connect to a couple of my friends that way instead.
 
 
Whether a physical machine or a VM, they are just hosts on the network, so nothing changes with RDP or the way you do it. I RDP into my work machine from my desktop as well. As long as your traffic is local, it does not go though NAT/PAT, even if it is a different network. The only time NAT/PAT are used is when the traffic goes out to or comes in from the internet.
 
 
Yes, all the data is stored in a .vhdx file. There are other files in another directory that store the VM configuration data and temporary files. You can allow communication between the VM's and the host. This is called a Private newtork/vSwitch type. You would have another NIC to configure on the host, and then add another NIC to each VM to facilitate this communication on any network range you would like. This traffic does not go outside of Hyper-V.
 
 
Yes, and I am also doing Active Directory and NPS on it. Yes, you will need a license key for W10 the same as always. Microsoft actually stopped doing the free W10 upgrades last year I think it was. This is why my NextPVR VM is actually Windows 8.1.
 
 
Yes, building the hardware is definitely the easy part. Once you get into installing and configuring the software, you will see that it gets to be a lot! My wife gets upset when I tell her I need to do an upgrade or update something because to her, that means that something isn't going to work. She has to have her TV, and downtime is not acceptable!

@Umfriend
 
I have this same setup at home. Here is very briefly how it is done:
Install Server 2016 Standard on your server hardware as normal (USB key, DVD, etc) Once it is up and running, go to Server Manager and install the Hyper-V role A Hyper-V option will then appear in Server Manager where you can right-click on your server and start Hyper-V Manager to configure networking and create/manage virtual machines. When creating a VM, it takes you through a wizard where you configure its characteritics, the most common being CPU, RAM, Disk, and Network You have a few options when it comes to networking in Hyper-V. You can just use your existing NIC as a bridge to carry both host and VM traffic, meaning that all your VM's will be on the same network as the server. You can also configure the NIC as a trunk with your switch to carry traffic for multiple networks on separate VLAN's, meaning your VM's can be on different networks from your host. You can also install a router VM in Hyper-V and use that to route between the VM's and the bridge NIC on your host, meaning your VM's can be on different networks, that do not exist outside of Hyper-V, from your host.
 
In the most simple setup, you would just bridge your NIC and install whatever VM's you want. Hyper-V uses the concept of vSwitches internally. You create a vSwitch if there isn't one by default, allowing the management operating system to share it. Then you just pick that vSwitch for the NIC on all the VM's you create.
 
In my case, I have a trunk between the server NIC and my switch so I can pick the vSwitch for my VM NIC's and then assign a VLAN ID to it that tells it what network (VLAN) it is in. I am running Essentials and Hyper-V on mine against @Christopher's warning, but I do not use the VPN function...that is on my router. I have a VM for Emby, one for NextPVR, and one that runs Apache, ISC DHCP Server, Bind9, MRTG, and TeamSpeak.
 
I hope this helps!

@aron, you will be better off getting support in the VMware forums as we are not ESXi experts here, and this has nothing to do with Stablebit products.  What I do know is that the command you have issued is a list of partitions, so this is one device with 8 partitions on it and is the disk you have ESXi installed on.  It could be that your other disks are not partitioned and formatted yet or your controller is not presenting the disks properly...not really sure.  I see that your controller does appear on the compatibility list, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SMART data is supported for it in the product.

I was just wondering if you guys have given any thought toward developing and offering a NAS-type product based on Windows Nano Server (assuming it works out with licensing)? You could include DrivePool, Scanner, CloutDrive, and any future products on it as the trial versions and sell licenses as you do now.
 
Of course, it would have to be remote GUI or have a web UI. This would also be a good platform for doing some media things with something like Emby. It would be really light-weight and easy to maintain, and it can be installed on a physical box or as a VM.

@aron, you will be better off getting support in the VMware forums as we are not ESXi experts here, and this has nothing to do with Stablebit products.  What I do know is that the command you have issued is a list of partitions, so this is one device with 8 partitions on it and is the disk you have ESXi installed on.  It could be that your other disks are not partitioned and formatted yet or your controller is not presenting the disks properly...not really sure.  I see that your controller does appear on the compatibility list, but that doesn't necessarily mean that SMART data is supported for it in the product.

I had issues when I last used BitTorrent Sync (When it was in beta) and ended up losing some files and was also looking for a way to use a friend as backup. We settled on AllwaySync, which works very well and does not impact our files at all. It does cost a little, but it is well worth it in my opinion.

I updated my setup about 6 months ago and thought I would share as it works better than ever:
 
Chassis: Norco 4220
Power Supply: LEPA 1600W
Motherboard: SUPERMICRO MBD-X9DR7-LN4F-O
Processor: Intel Xeon E5-2660 x2
Memory: G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 32GB x4
Add-On: HighPoint RocketRAID 2760A
Operating System: Hyper-V Server 2012 R2
OS Drive: 480 GB Mushkin SSD
VM Drives: 240GB OCZ Agility 3 x3 (RAID 0)
VM Backup Drive: Samsung 1TB in a dual eSATA dock
DrivePool VM: Windows Server 2012 Essentials
DrivePool Drives: Toshiba 3TB x9 (Pass-Throughto WS2012E VM)​​
DrivePool Drives: Seagate 3TB x8 (Pass-Through to WS2012E VM)
DrivePool Drives: HGST 6TB x3 (Pass-Through to WS2012E VM)
 
Other Services on VMs: Web, TeamSpeak server and music, MySQL (For Kodi and Web), DNS, DHCP, RADIUS, IM, E-Mail/Webmail, Video/Music conversion for mobile​

Most likely, you need to allow remote management of the event viewer. 
This link should help.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/server_core/archive/2008/01/14/configuring-the-firewall-for-remote-management-of-a-workgroup-server-core-installation.aspx
This is EXACTLY what you're looking for, and it covers MORE than just the event viewer. It should cover EVERYTHING that exists in the Computer Management console, which is even better.
 
Personally, I went and set up a group policy for this on my domain, so I don't have to do anything ever again.

-> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcoding
 
One example is when you want to stream your BluRay material to a device that is not capable of
playing it natively, like your 1280x768 tablet.
Transcoding means to convert the codecs (video and/or audio) from source to desired/supported destination formats.
 
...you can do that "offline", meaning to store different versions of your media for each player...this will take time and a faster CPU helps, but eventually
you'll finish the jobs and the only thing you really need is disk-space.
Some people are in for doing this live, on-the-fly, which means you need a really beefy CPU for this.
A famous application that supports this is Plex...and having a beefy Socket-1150v3 or Socket-2011 quad+ core XEON really helps here.
 
...but for streaming material "raw" (when the client device can handle it natively), this is not needed.
You can create digital "backups" of your media, like from your dvds or blurays.
.... don't know if it is legit to do so for copy protected material in your jurisdiction though...there are apps that help in the process, like AnyDVD or makemkv.
This is *not* transcoding (as the codecs auf audio/video stay the same, what changes is the container, like from avi to mkv, only)...the speed of the optical drive is usually the limit...CPU performance is not an issue here.
 
You can "shrink" (transcode) the material to create smaller media files to stream later with apps like handbrake...these usually work offline.
I don't do this on my server but on my (XEON based) workstation...server just holds/stores the data, as disk space is getting cheaper and cheaper
...and this saves a lot of energy 

I use AllwaySync, which works really great.  It preserves time stamps, downloads the file to a temp location until complete, has 2-way and 1-way sync, and allows you to run multiple jobs with easy to use filters and automatic synchronization.  This is an excerpt from the license agreement for the free version.
 
 
In the past, I had tried RoboCopy, which worked well but did not do well when network connectivity was temporarily lost...even with the restart option.  My experience with Bittorrent Sync was horrible with an early beta version, and I ended up losing some time stamp data and even lost some files because of it.

Very nice, glad it worked!  I will pretend that the next beer I drink is from you.  
 

That is correct.  Since pass-through does not alter the disk in any way, you can pass-through existing pooled disks to a Virtual Machine with DrivePool installed and still have all your data and have the drives automatically form a pool.

I would say that looks very normal if you are not using the Disk Space Equalizer plugin, which is a separate download.  This is my order for balancers, and my data is equally distributed across all disks.  The File Placement Limiter, also a separate download, allows prevent Duplicated and/or Unduplicated data from being place on individual disks, which is good when you have a disk that is on its way out and you don't trust it with duplicated data.
 

@aron, this article covers how to get SMART data in Stablebit Scanner running in a Windows VM with RDM disks on an ESXi host.  The following is the KB article from VMware about how to query SMART data from your drives from the ESXi host CLI: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2040405
 
You will also need to make sure that passing of SMART data is supported on your particular controller.  Here is an example from my host:
~ # esxcli storage core device smart get -d naa.5e83a97f147d02bc Parameter Value Threshold Worst ---------------------------- ----- --------- ----- Health Status OK N/A N/A Media Wearout Indicator 0 0 0 Write Error Count N/A N/A N/A Read Error Count 117 50 100 Power-on Hours 100 0 100 Power Cycle Count 100 0 100 Reallocated Sector Count 100 3 100 Raw Read Error Rate 117 50 100 Drive Temperature 30 0 30 Driver Rated Max Temperature N/A N/A N/A Write Sectors TOT Count N/A N/A N/A Read Sectors TOT Count N/A N/A N/A Initial Bad Block Count N/A N/A N/A

Thanks!  I was not aware of this setting.  By the way, you don't have to go through all that for RDM anymore.  All you need to do is the following and then any disk (not USB) you plugin in thereafter will be available for RDM:
In the ESXi Console window, highlight your server Go to the Configuration tab Under Software, click Advanced Settings Click RdmFilter Uncheck the box for RdmFilter.HbaIsShared Click OK

Thanks!  I was not aware of this setting.  By the way, you don't have to go through all that for RDM anymore.  All you need to do is the following and then any disk (not USB) you plugin in thereafter will be available for RDM:
In the ESXi Console window, highlight your server Go to the Configuration tab Under Software, click Advanced Settings Click RdmFilter Uncheck the box for RdmFilter.HbaIsShared Click OK

Hi Val3ntin,
 
It is feasible, as it works for me.  I have WSE2012 in ESXi 5.1.
 
1. Link your physical disks to ESXi using the RDM technique described in this blog (http://blog.davidwarburton.net/2010/10/25/rdm-mapping-of-local-sata-storage-for-esxi/)
2. In file "C:\Program Files (x86)\StableBit\Scanner\Service\Scanner.Service.exe.config", change setting "UnsafeDirectIo" to "True" - don't forget to reboot !
 
 
Good luck.

You are right that Windows Server 2012 Essentials is a good chunk of change!  It does have a dashboard, Client Backups, Shared Folder management, and Remote Access, the same as WHS does.  In addition to this, it also provides a DNS server, and VPN server for remote connectivity to your network.  The downside to 2012 Essentials is the following:
It makes your clients join the domain when you install the connector In order to enable remote access, you must install a valid certificate It statically sets all connected client DNS addresses to its IP address File transfer rates to the server are initially quite slow If you are willing to put in some extra time, all of these issues can be worked around as follows:
Skip domain joining when installing the connector Create a self-signed certificate and enable Anywhere Access Keep services from setting a static DNS entry for the server Disable SMB signing to speed up file transfer rates Another thing to keep in mind is that Windows 8.1 will likely be released in October and Windows Server 2012 R2 at around the same time.  The upgrade from Windows 8 to 8.1 will be free, but I am not sure about the server versions.
 
If price is your biggest obstacle, then Windows 7/8 and a PC backup solution will be cheaper than a server OS.  WHS 2011 is not going away any time soon.  It is still available for OEM pre-installs until 2025.
 
I think that your choice of OS depends on the features you would like to have versus the ones you must have.  I choose Windows Server 2012 Essentials because I want and use pretty much all of its features, except media streaming and VPN.  Desktop solutions are always much cheaper, but you may have to spend more money or a lot of time trying to get other features you may want, such as remote access/media streaming, PC backups, centralized user management, VPN, DNS server, etc.