FlexRAID on WHS

I thought that was the whole point of flexraiding the tombstones, for system drive restore purposes, so you didn't have to rebuild the tombstones on a system restore. I thought someone from here acutally did this. I will have to reread this thread.

I currently use the duplication option, but like many others, I am reaching a capacity with my movies where duplication doesn't make since. Therefore, I want to go down the flexraid route, but make sure I understand it's and WHS's limitations.

Ok, I've been reading through this for some information about just HOW to Restore Tombstones in WHS, and unless I just missed it, I'm not finding a link to this. I moved my WHS to my ESXi Host and stood it up as a Virtual Machine because I stumbled upon a thread on a different forum that said FlexRaid would restore tombstones, and that all a user needed to do is install FlexRaid and run the restore-tombstone command...well, I tried and it didn't work so I obviously goofed somewhere. There's not really much for instructions for FlexRaid that I can find so I'm left to reading posts and doing searches to try to piece together the info, but this hasn't provided much for direction. On my WHS server I have installed the Basic Host 1.4, the Web UI 1.4, and the Basic CMD Client 1.0 in hopes that one of these would allow me to do the restore, so I opened the CMD line client and attempted to run the command restore-tombstone it tells me invalid command - ignoring and I've also tried restore-tombstones nada!
Help, I'm just trying to get this thing back to 100% as the machine that WHS was physically living on is on its last legs, and besides I wanted to Virtualize my stuff onto one machine so that I could unplug some things from the wall and save some electricity $.

For anyone who isnt aware of this, MS has recently dropped the price of WHS2011 (64bit) with 10 Cals to around £40/$40 which would make it the perfect choice for an MS based storage appliance running Flexraid (assuming somebody wanted to stay legal)

Combine that with the HP Microserver while the cash back offer is still on and you have a pretty slick alternative to a proprietry "NAS" for

£140 (£240-£100 cashback) for the server itself
£72 (£102-30 cashback) for 3 years next business day onsite warranty
£40 for WHS2011

Total of £252 for a server grade machine with low power useage and with 3 year onsite piece of mind plus whatever additional drives you want to put in it

Put flexraid ontop of that and I dont think any proprietry NAS appliances really compare for price/features/functionality

Well, late to the party as usual! Sorry to see that this thread may have died. Maybe this might revive it? I have been running WHS v1 for over a year. Have 22TB with everything duplicated. Not practical for sure. Have read thru this whole thread multiple times, googled lots of other places, forums, etc trying to get educated. To say stuff is scattered and confusing is an understatement. In any event, I still wish to try Flexraid on my WHS for media shares, as most here are doing. I am sitting here trying to decide whether to try 1.3 or 2.0. 1.3 seems to have a lot more information posted, and I believe it's a non-expiring final release. Have been thru all the Wikis (old and new) and trying to find as much info about installing and using Flexraid on WHS.

Any help to consolidate all this thread info, wikis, etc for me would be greatly appreciated. I believe I have a good understanding but would like to be sure.

580guy wrote:Well, late to the party as usual! Sorry to see that this thread may have died. Maybe this might revive it? I have been running WHS v1 for over a year. Have 22TB with everything duplicated. Not practical for sure. Have read thru this whole thread multiple times, googled lots of other places, forums, etc trying to get educated. To say stuff is scattered and confusing is an understatement. In any event, I still wish to try Flexraid on my WHS for media shares, as most here are doing. I am sitting here trying to decide whether to try 1.3 or 2.0. 1.3 seems to have a lot more information posted, and I believe it's a non-expiring final release. Have been thru all the Wikis (old and new) and trying to find as much info about installing and using Flexraid on WHS.

Any help to consolidate all this thread info, wikis, etc for me would be greatly appreciated. I believe I have a good understanding but would like to be sure.

True. Working on it.

Read this: http://wiki.flexraid.com/2011/06/04/support-for-whs-v1-in-flexraid-2-0/

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 18/09/2011 13:39:46

True. Working on it.

Read this: http://wiki.flexraid.com/2011/06/04/support-for-whs-v1-in-flexraid-2-0/

Thanks. I have read this also. Doesn't make too much sense to me yet, but hopefully it will once I get back to my server and play around with FlexRAID. Will probably try 2.0 first.

One question that I can't seem to answer is:

If my system drive fails on WHS, and I do a restore (keeps my shares), then the installation of FlexRAID is gone except for the parity drive. Once I re-install Flexraid again, is there a way I can use the previous config (if you can back that up and save it somewhere) or do I have to start all over from scratch with FlexRAID and have no protection until I re-create the array and re-create parity?

I feel like the PPU is sitting there untouched and I shouldn't have to re-create it? Can this be done? Could a scriipt be made to make copies of config files to save somewhere for eventual restore in this situation?

Thanks for your time.

Edit: just found out about FlexRAID-Config.db. So that answers that!!
http://wiki.flexraid.com/2011/06/24/backing-up-and-migrating-raid-configuration-data/
(always finding more to read around here).....

I have just bought WHS 2011 and not installed it yet.
1: But if I download FlexRAID now, do I then have this problem:
"I can change the filesystem type to NTFS. However, this doesn't trick Windows Media Center into seeing the storage pool as an NTFS volume. It still says I can't use the storage pool because it's not formatted as NTFS. I wonder if WHS users will have the same issue."
(Found here: http://www.openegg.org/forums/posts/list/20/966.page).

2: What version of FlexRAID shall I download to get the addin? ...is that FlexRAID View??

I'm a little confused and hope someone can help me with my first steps with FlexRAID

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 21/09/2011 09:53:51

Ken4000 wrote:I have just bought WHS 2011 and not installed it yet.
1: But if I download FlexRAID now, do I then have this problem:
"I can change the filesystem type to NTFS. However, this doesn't trick Windows Media Center into seeing the storage pool as an NTFS volume. It still says I can't use the storage pool because it's not formatted as NTFS. I wonder if WHS users will have the same issue."
(Found here: http://www.openegg.org/forums/posts/list/20/966.page).

2: What version of FlexRAID shall I download to get the addin? ...is that FlexRAID View??

I'm a little confused and hope someone can help me with my first steps with FlexRAID

Try reading the wiki articles first: http://wiki.flexraid.com

The add-in for WHSv2 is not yet ready.
That said, the next release won't really need an add-in as WHSv2 will see the FlexRAID drive as a standard drive (natural integration).
See this thread: http://www.openegg.org/forums/posts/list/972.page

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 22/09/2011 01:07:04

Brahim wrote:
Try reading the wiki articles first: http://wiki.flexraid.com

The add-in for WHSv2 is not yet ready.
That said, the next release won't really need an add-in as WHSv2 will see the FlexRAID drive as a standard drive (natural integration).
See this thread: http://www.openegg.org/forums/posts/list/972.page

Thank you Brahim for the answers to my questions

If I download it now, install and configure it for a start. Can I then upgrade to the new release just by upgrading the software or do I need to start over?

Now the 10 million question: Are there a date for when the next release will be available for download in a stable version to us deadly people?

Best regards
Kenneth