otispresley

Thanks Quinn! I do have Scanner running on the host, and it reports all disks healthy with no SMART issues. I have tried recording to the pool several times over the past year with the same result. The host was originally on Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 and the VM was on WS2012E. I am wondering if it may not be because the driver for my RAID card is running on Hyper-V Server rather than on a full version of Windows Server. The individual drive I am using is not on the same controller as the pooled drives.

Hello, I am curious whether anyone is recording live TV to their DrivePool? A little bit about my setup: Server is running Hyper-V Server 2016 Tech Preview 5 My controller is a HP RR 2760A DrivePool is running on a Windows Server 2012 R2 Essentials VM All disks are passed through to the WS2012E VM All disks are 7200 RPM mechanical I have 3x HDHomeRun CONNECT and NextPVR for live TV The pool is not good for recording live TV. I can record 1 show fine, maybe 2, but definitely not 3. For this reason, I am currently using a standalone disk passed through for recording and can successfully record 6 shows at once. However, I would very much like to be able to record to the pool. Would creating a 2x SSD Landing Zone with the SSD Optimizer plugin be sufficient for this since the highest level of duplication I have is x2? Does anyone have any experience with it? Thanks!

Cool deal, thanks! I have not tried Nano Server yet. They just released Tech Preview 4, but I decided to wait until the final release before messing with Containers and Nano Server just because I do not want to introduce anything that could cause instability on my server. I originally installed Tech Preview 3 because all my Windows PC's are now running Windows 10 and there were some issues causing me to be unable to manage Hyper-V 2012 R2 with that version of Hyper-V Manager.

That sounds cool! I think it would be great to also see an unsupported path where we would install Nano Server and get the hardware working and then install your software on top of it, which would be great for those of us who have already invested heavily in our hardware.

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.

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​

I think you have to be careful whichever way you choose. With RemoteFX, the default license is only 120 days, last I checked, and then you have to purchase a license. With ESXi, if you want real 3D support, then you need to do DirectPath I/O (PCI Pass-through), and not all hardware works correctly when you do that. Definitely do some research and make sure that others have had success with your graphics hardware; you may end up opting for different hardware to make it work. Getting 3D graphics support in a VM is still pretty difficult at this point in time without the right hardware. XenServer supports sharing of a graphics card between multiple VM's, but only with very specific hardware. XenServer management tools are not great or fully featured when you want to do things like NIC bonding. Hyper-V remote management can be a pain to get set up but is fine afterward; once again, you have to go to the CLI for NIC bonding and updating firewall rules (at least initially). You are able to perform most all management tasks for ESXi from the management GUI. There is also KVM, which is a kernel hypervisor (type 2). With this, your VMs use your actual hardware rather than virtualizing it. There are both benefits and drawbacks to this approach, but KVM has become very popular and is the default hypervisor for OpenStack. Honestly, you may have better luck with 3D graphics in desktop software, like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox.

Hi chrisnasah, The easiest way to do this is to just do pass through (RDM) of your 4 physical disks to the Windows server VM. There are posts in these forums about how to do this. This will leave all the data intact, and since the pool information is on the disks, then DrivePool will automatically detect them and pool them. You can either pass the disks through or pass the whole controller through, as long as it is a separate controller than the one you are using for VMware disks. Hope this helps!

Hi, I used to use two LSI 2008 cards and they were great, one was RAID and one was not. There are no speed issues with them as they are faster than your network can currently handle. The maximum throughput of a Gigabit Ethernet link is 125MB/s. Due to overhead, I usually got about 113MB/s across the network downloading from a mechanical HDD connected to the LSI 2008. Drive to Drive on the same controller, it was as high as 170+MB/s. I built a new server and am now using a HighPoint RocketRaid 2760A, only because it can take 24 drives; otherwise I would still be using the LSI 2008. The speeds on the HighPoint card are much the same as they were on the LSI 2008.

Yes, these drives are especially terrible! I had 20 of them in my Norco 4220 at one point. After repeatedly having to RMA them for SMART warnings, errors, and dead drives, I started to replace the out of warranty ones with Toshiba 3TB drives and most recently with HGST 6TB drives. If the problem Seagate is still under warranty, then I do the warranty replacement. At any rate, I am now down to 8 of these Seagate drives, only one of which is over 2 years old and some of which are RMA'ed drives, left in my system, 9 Toshibas, and 3 HGST. I have not yet had to RMA any Toshiba or HGST drives. They say the warranty on the Seagates is 2 years, but they consider this from time of manufacture, not the time you purchased it.

Glad to hear it!

Yeah, it sounds like getting those files off the SSD, even just as a backup, is the best course of action until you can replace that disk.

Yeah, I was on VMware, and the only way you could do GPU acceleration in a VM was to do PCI Passthrough (DirectPath I/O) of the card to the VM, and the last time I checked, only certain AMD cards seemed to work half way right. I do have Sandy Bridge Xeon's in my server and so used an Ubuntu Server VM with the Handbrake CLI to do my encodes for mobile device viewing. I just wrote a script that mounts the DrivePool shares and checks the two directory structures for differences and either creates or deletes a mobile encode to match the main video directory structure. I do not encode my in-home files, just use tsMuxer re-package the unaltered video, subtitles, and audio streams into an M2TS container. Depending on the file size and parameters, Handbrake normally takes anywhere from 20 to 60 minutes to encode a feature length video at the lower resolution.

@RobbieH, RDM (Raw Device Mapping) devices are meant to be physical drives, not VMDK files on a drive. It is meant to be able to take a disk with any format (NTFS, EXT4, etc) and attach it to a VM as-is, so that you can avoid having to reformat the disk as VMFS and thus destroying the existing data on it. You do give up the ability to take a snapshot of the VM by doing so though. If you have VMDK files on a failing SSD that you need to get off of there, I would suggest you just do a disk-to-disk copy and get them off as soon as possible. If the SSD is formatted with VMFS and you need to read it in Windows, then there are several utilities out there that will allow you to do that. When you move a VMDK that has RDM disks attached to it, then you will most likely need to delete the RDM disks from the VM settings and then add them back before the VM will boot properly...delete from disk is OK here since these are just files that point to a physical location and will not impact the data on the disks. I hope this helps!

When I was on ESXi, I also did RDM. The instructions in the above post are old and no longer necessary. See this post for easier instructions using only the vSphere client. Once a disk is passed through, it is only available to that one VM. You would have to create shares for other VMs to access it. I created an internal network for communication between VM's so that communication between them didn't have to go through the physical switch. Another options is that if all your disks you want to use for DrivePool are on a separate controller from your ESXi system disks, then you can also us PCI Passthrough to pass the entire controller to the VM so it is using it natively. In both of the above methods, you will not be able to take a snapshot of the VM. If you use a backup solution like ghettoVCB, then the content of the passed through disks will not be backed up. If you create datastores on all the disks, then you are locked to VMFS and cannot read these disks on a Windows machine without some software to read VMFS volumes. With the pass through methods, all the disks will be NTFS and can be read on any Windows machine.

Hi RobbieH, I only ever used ghettoVCB with my ESXi system. There are other free solutions, but they generally require you to install an agent on the VMs so they can do OS backups as well. In my case, I didn't care about incremental or file-level restores; full VM restores worked fine for me as I did a backup once per week and kept 3. As far as backing up the host goes, you can just back up your settings and then just apply them to a new install of ESXi as it is about the same thing anyway. Here is an article on doing that:

Thank you very much, Christopher!

You would think so. I looked into this and the option to "Attach Task To This Event" is grayed out for me from my remote management console, and I have not been able to discover how to enable it or else how to do it from PowerShell. It will require more research.

Hi Christopher, thanks for that! I was not aware that would allow you to backup the VM files while running as well! One thing I do like about HV Backup is that it places each VM backup into its own separate zip file. I suppose I could still script that once the wbadmin backup finishes, but I like to keep things simple when possible.

This is what I recently had to do, so I thought I would post about my experiences in case it might help someone else. The first question you may ask about this topic is, "Why?". I recently upgraded my server hardware and bought a new SAS controller that was not supported by ESXI. It was nearly half the price of all other similar RAID controllers, so I really did not want to have to return it and end up taking up multiple PCI Express slots with multiple cards. A long time ago, I had used the original Hyper-V server 2008 and migrated to ESXi due to limitations in the original Hyper-V and due to the fact that I wanted to be able to use OVF/OVA templates. It turns out that the OVA files can just be extracted with 7-zip and there you have the disks and virtual machine information you need to convert the VMDK files to VHD files; however, I had never found this out until recently. This brings us to the first issue...how to get your virtual machines from ESXi into Hyper-V. If you have the luxury of being able to have both servers online at the same time, the migration is really easy with several different tools. For most of us at home, this is not an option. I had been using the great free script, ghettoVCB, in a cron job on the ESXi host to back up my VM's to an eSATA dock with a drive in it and had used it for restore operations several times over the years. Since the disks are converted offline, the CPU and memory assignments from the VM's in ESXi were recorded for VM creation once Hyper-V was installed. I used the ESXi client to download all the backups to an NTFS volume so I could read it from my Windows PC and access the backed up VMDK files. I ended up running into problems with one of my Ubuntu Server VM's after the conversion and had to install a new one from scratch. This means I needed something that could read a VMDK file with Linux partitions from my Windows PC. For this part, I used Diskinternals Linux Reader that also supports VMFS volumes to access the VMFS volume and copy all the VMDK files from my backups. Anyway, back to converting the VMDK files to VHD. There are quite a few tools available to perform this conversion, but the one I settled on was 2tware Convert VHD. It was easy to use, fast, and free! At this point, I installed Hyper-V Server 2012 R2, performed initial setup, re-partitioned and formatted my RAID for VM storage and my backup disk, and configured remote management and remote desktop. I changed the default location for VHD and VM storage to point to my VM RAID in Hyper-V settings. Then, I shared my drive with the VHD files on it and used the Hyper-V Server CLI to transfer all the VHD files to the virtual hard disks directory and created my Virtual Machines; you should definitely enable dynamic memory on all your VM's. It works on Ubuntu 13.10 and up. Also, don't forget to update Integration Services on your VM's where needed and remove VMware Tools from them. No tools are necessary for Hyper-V in Linux, because they are built into the kernel. With Hyper-V Server 2012 R2, configuring remote management and remote desktop is easy using the setup menu you see when you log in. You need to install Hyper-V Manager on the machine you want to use to manage your Hyper-V server from, in my case a Windows 8.1 PC. Then you can create a Microsoft Management Console to manage everything from one place. In this console, I put the following all pointing to the hyper-V server: Hyper-V Manager Computer Management Group Policy Windows Firewall In order to access the Hyper-V server from your PC, you need to edit your %WINDIR%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file and add an entry for your Hyper-V server, because it must be added by name rather than IP Address. It must also be in the same work group as the PC you are managing it from, or else you will need to update some firewall rules. You will also want to create a share on your Hyper-V server for uploading ISO files for VM installations and such. This makes things much easier. For scheduled backup of my VM's, I decided to use HV Backup after reading that the wbadmin tool places the VM in a saved state while backing it up. This was easy to set up; I just unzipped it and copied the folder into my upload directory from above. I also needed to back up the OS on the Hyper-V server, which I was not doing on ESXi...shame on me! For this, I had to install Windows Server Backup using the command: dism /online /enable-feature:WindowsServerBackup. When a backup task finishes, I wanted to receive an email stating that it was done so I could review the logs to make sure there were no errors. In order to be able to execute the PowerShell script, you have to enter the following at the Hyper-V Server CLI: set-executionpolicy remotesigned I named the script SendEmail.ps1 and added the HV Backup log file as an attachment. Edit it as needed for your environment: Write-Host "Sending Email" #SMTP server name $smtpServer = "<server_name_or_ip>" $file = "lastlog_out.txt" #Creating a Mail object $msg = new-object Net.Mail.MailMessage #Creating SMTP server object $smtp = new-object Net.Mail.SmtpClient($smtpServer) $att = new-object Net.Mail.Attachment($file) #Email structure $msg.From = "<from_email_address>" $msg.ReplyTo = "<reply_to_email_address>" $msg.To.Add("<to_email_address>") $msg.subject = "<subject>" $msg.body = "A backup task has completed. See log files at 'C:\Windows\Logs\WindowsServerBackup\' for information about the system backup. Refer to the attached file for details about virtual machine backups." $msg.Attachments.Add($att) #Sending email $smtp.Send($msg) $att.Dispose() Here is where I created a batch script in the same directory that HV Backup was in. I called it HVBackup.bat and put the following lines in it where F: is the backup drive and C: is the OS drive. It first deletes any zip files older than 14 days in order to better manage space. I am managing the OS backups manually. Edit it as needed for your environment: @ECHO OFF forfiles /p f:\ /m *.zip /d -14 /c "cmd /c del @path" wbadmin start backup -backupTarget:f: -include:c: -quiet -allCritical .\HVBackup.exe -a -o f:\ 1> lastlog_out.txt 2> lastlog_err.txt Powershell.exe -executionpolicy remotesigned -File .\SendEmail.ps1 That was pretty much it. The server has been running great for me with all my storage disks passed through to my Windows Server 2012 Essentials VM, and network performance with DrivePool seems to be more stable so far than they were in ESXi with RDM disks. I hope this is helpful to someone.

There are some options you will want to check in DrivePool. I think these are mentioned somewhere in this thread, but make sure the following are enabled and then try again: Go to Pool Options > Performance and make sure Read Striping and Network I/O Boost are enabled. I have 20 drives in my pool, and network transfer rates are near max gigabit speeds (112 MB/s); The max is 125 MB/s.

AnyDVD HD does everything.

Hi, DVD's are 480p, so they are not High Definition (HD). You can encode it at a higher resolution, but the source is still only 480p and so the picture quality will not be any better than the DVD. Plus, any time you encode to another format, there is a loss in quality. There are up-converters built into most televisions; while the result is slightly better than DVD, it is still no substitute for content from a real HD source (Blu-Ray). As far as digitizing goes, I have had a lifetime license for AnyDVD HD for several years and find it to be a great tool for decryption, and it can also rip the disk to an ISO or just to your hard disk if you want. In order to be playable in Windows, you do not have to convert it. I still use DVD Shrink to rip to a single VOB file, and it works fine with AnyDVD performing the decryption. For Blu-Ray, I use tsMuxer to rip to a single M2TS file. If you want smaller files and wider playback support, then you need to encode to another format, like MP4 or WMV. MP4 is compatible with many more players than WMV. If you go the MP4 route, then I recommend Handbrake. These are free options, except for AnyDVD. If you don't mind paying, then DVD fab, as lee1978 mentions, is a good all-in-one tool that supports DVD and Blu-Ray and does its own decryption.

On the DrivePool download page, it is in the list of Operating Systems under the Windows 7 (64 Bit) heading.