February 2011 – Tom on Tech

Do you want to get involved in a local tech community?

Are you an IT professional or developer that uses Microsoft technologies on a daily basis? Are you looking for a local community of fellow devs or IT pros? Look no further than the Microsoft User Community.

On Facebook, Microsoft has launched the User Community page, where you can locate User Groups and other community events in your area. The User Community page is designed to provide a central location for finding and organizing events and promoting the event to a large audience.

If you’re looking to get involved in any sort of user group (.NET, SQL Server, etc.) I highly recommend you “join in” and find the user group nearest you.

User Community on Facebook | User Community on Twitter

Drive Bender Beta Now Available

Division-M, the company behind Drive Bender, has made available the beta release of their flagship product. With Drive Bender, you will be able to achieve some Drive Extender like functionality with storage pooling and data duplication.

This beta release is no where near final and does come with some risk. I do NOT recommend using Drive Bender on a server with production data.

System Requirements:

– Windows Home Server 2011

– .NET Framework 4.0 (if not installed, the Drive Bender installer will take care of this for you)

Important Notes:

– As stated previously, DO NOT use with production data. You are solely responsible for taking necessary precautions with your data.

– This release does not contain the add-in for the Windows Home Server 2011 Console. It will be coming in a future release.

– Performance during read/write operations is not optimal (read: saving and accessing data is slow)

– Be aware of a locking issue when renaming folders.

– When deleting folders or files, if a lock is held on the target folder or files, the folder or files may remain on one or more volumes in the storage pool.

– A file size check has not been implemented yet. What this means is that Drive Bender does not check to make sure that there is enough space in the pool when files are being stored to properly ensure data integrity. This will be fixed in a future release.

To download Drive Bender, click here.

Microsoft Student Insider Kickoff 2011

If you’re reading this, it means that I have arrived in Seattle, Washington for the 2011 Microsoft Student Insider kickoff and 2011 Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Summit.

Over the next eight days, I’ll be meeting with various product groups, meeting new people, and hopefully gathering information that I can share with you my readers. (Might be tough, as both events are covered under Non-Disclosure Agreements.)

I don’t have a schedule yet for the Student Insider kickoff, but will have one in the morning, and as I know more, you’ll know more.

For MVP Summit, I’ll be meeting with the Windows Home and Small Business Server team as well as attending some fun sessions to learn some new things.

I’ll be taking lots of pictures over the next few days, and will have a link posted to a photo gallery as soon as the first batch of photos are uploaded.

Life after Drive Extender

As I’m sure everyone is now well aware, Microsoft has removed Drive Extender from both Windows Home Server 2011 and Windows Small Business Server Essentials 2011. This now leaves it up to third parties and OEMs to fill the void that has been left in the marketplace.

So far, there are some companies that are stepping up and creating what look to be some very promising solutions. Let’s look at each of them.

StableBit DrivePool – StableBit DrivePool is an add-in that will bring some element of drive pooling and folder duplication to the WHS/SBSe 2011 platform. According to the developer’s website, DrivePool will let you take multiple hard drives and combine them into one storage pool. You can create shared folders on this pool and choose whether or not to duplicate folders. Sounds a lot like Drive Extender. There are a couple caveats to DrivePool, however. The first is that DrivePool is an add-in and requires that WHS/SBSe be installed. The second is that data is only duplicated once (stored on two hard drives), not much unlike how Drive Extender is implemented in WHSv1. As of right now, the add-in is in the alpha stages, a technical preview is expected in a few weeks, and no release date is known at this time. Look for more on DrivePool as it becomes available.
DriveBender – DriveBender is a new storage pooling product that is looking to WHS/SBSe as well as all versions of Windows. DriveBender is slated to have native 64-bit support, use a file system that can be read in other PCs, support data duplication, be self-balancing, and add new storage quickly and easily. DriveBender is slated to release a beta on the 21st of this month, so look forward to more on DriveBender in the next few days and weeks.
DataCore – DataCore is a storage virtualization company with years of experience in the enterprise storage space and is looking at providing a solution for WHS/SBSe customers. Not much in terms of specifics are known at this time about what DataCore will be offering, but they are looking to bring some of their provisioning and mirroring features to WHS/SBSe. WeGotServed did an interview with a VP from DataCore that provides some insight as to the direction DataCore is headed. I look forward to seeing what they bring to the table in the next weeks, months, and years.

These are just three possible solutions and don’t take into account what OEMs are planning or DIY solutions like Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology or using a hardware RAID setup.

It’s going to be interesting to see how the storage landscape for Windows Home Server evolves over time. I, for one, am glad to see third parties stepping up to fill the void that Microsoft left.

Seattle-bound for MVP Summit and Student Insider Meetup

I’ll be in Seattle February 23rd-March 3rd for Microsoft Student Insider stuff and the 2011 Microsoft MVP Summit. I’ll be taking my new SLR digital camera with me and taking lots of pictures, so look for those over the course of those eight days.

Please join me in welcoming the following to the Student Insider program for 2011:

Den Delimarsky –@denniscode – dennisdel.com – Den is what I consider a Windows Phone Ninja. He knows the platform inside and out and blogs about it extensively on his own website and on DreamInCode.
Drew Devault – @sircmpwn – sircmpwn.blogspot.com – Drew is an XNA and Silverlight wizard (and he’s still in high school!)
Billy O’Neal – @MalwareMiniGun – winwrench.com
Steven Nowak (Don’t have any blog or Twitter handle for Steven yet. When I do I’ll update this.)

MVP summit content is covered under the Non-Disclosure Agreement, so I’m not able to talk about what I’ll be doing there, other than to say that I’ll be meeting with the Home and Small Business Server team at various points through out the week. If you have any questions that you want me to try to answer, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Windows Home Server 2011 Walkthroughs

To coincide with the release of the Release Candidate build of Windows Home Server 2011, I will be posting walkthroughs of functionality in Windows Home Server 2011 periodically. These are very high-level walkthroughs (think 100-level) and are designed to provide a brief introduction into the Windows Home Server 2011 feature set.

(To view these walkthroughs you will need to have Adobe Flash Player installed.)

Walkthroughs:

Windows Home Server 2011 Dashboard

Windows Home Server 2011 Launchpad

Windows Home Server 2011 Remote Access

Windows Home Server 2011 Release Candidate Now Available

Today Microsoft has made available to the public, the Release Candidate build of Windows Home Server 2011.

This build is the first build made available without Drive Extender technology, and is the first build to officially reveal that “Vail” will indeed be called Windows Home Server 2011. (For those that remember, I blogged about this after some confusion during CES.)

Because there is no Drive Extender anymore, you will need to rely either on some form of RAID to increase your amount of available storage, or rely on a large single drive if you want lots of storage from the get go. Microsoft is not saying too much yet about what they and their OEMs strategy is around storage. Hopefully in the coming days and weeks we will know more.

As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated. Since this is a release candidate, not everything can or will be acted upon, but every bug report will be looked at. You can file bugs online through the Microsoft Connect website.

For the build number curious amongst us, this is build 8400.16385 and is available from Microsoft Connect today. The CRC and SHA1 hashes for the ISO have been posted below along with steps to check the integrity of the downloaded ISO.

Hashes for today’s release:

Volume label: GRMSHSxFRE_EN_DVD

CRC: 0xC191510A

SHA1: 0x65AB44627F12E6FC5268BE2ED9F5489CB98021DF

To run MSCDCRC against an ISO file that you have downloaded follow these steps.

Download MSCDCRC to the same folder that you downloaded the Vail ISO to. (Click here to download MSCDCRC)
Open a Command Prompt window and navigate to the folder from Step 1
Type “MSCDCRC EN-US_WHS_PREM_InstallDVD.iso” (without quotes)
The integrity check will take a few moments to complete. After the check is complete compare the CRC and SHA hashes to the hashes posted below
If the hashes match then you have successfully downloaded the ISO