? about running SageTV on WHS

[crarbo1]

I've got SageTV on my WHS but wondering about the what if's.

My current WHS has got (1) 500 GB hard drive for the C and D partitions, and (3) 1 TB hard drives for everything else and they are formated for 64k clusters.

What if my 500 GB system drive fails? How long is the reinstallation process with a replacement drive? I don't want to be down for very long due to the WAF so I was just wondering what would be the expected delay. This is assuming that I back up my wiz.bin files every night via a file syncing tool installed on the WHS.

Also, what would be the down time if I was to go with Raid 1 with the system drive. I would think it wouldn't see it but I'm thinking that I would have to have an identical 500 GB hard drive to replace the bad one and then rebuild the array. Is that correct? If so, how long with the rebuild process take and does this process stop me from using SageTV from my WHS? I haven't messed with raid on anything so I'm somewhat clueless on this.

I'm just trying to figure out the best solution for minimal down time.

Thanks,
Chuck

[Peter_h]

Downtime is as good as your backup solution. It is best to have multiple backup solutions.

In addition to the wiz.bin, I would go ahead and backup your entire sage directory.

I do a daily backup of my entire sage folder to the shares in WHS. I then do a weekly, external backup. By copying over the entire Sage directory, you should be able to install sage and then dump the directory and it should work.

For the OS, you can RAID 1 it. I RAID 1 it and it is working fine. RAID 1 will allow 1 of your drives to fail and still run. Then, when you get the new drive, pop it in and array will rebuild itself.

As far as rebuilding the array, it depends on the RAID controller. When I boot, it will tell me the status of the RAID Array just after post. I don't have to do anything, it will just alert that it is rebuilding and boot WHS like normal. It rebuids in the background while WHS is running. It doesn't take very long as the OS is only 20GB.

I RAID 1 my OS and have a hot spare, meaning a drive that is sitting there unused. Once a week, I rotate a drive out so I always a spare drive with a working install on it.

I would also look into slipstreaming your OS install. This will allow for a much quicker reinstallation in the even that you lose the OS.

The final solution is to make regular images of your OS, minus the DE directory.

[crarbo1]

Originally Posted by Peter_h

For the OS, you can RAID 1 it. I RAID 1 it and it is working fine. RAID 1 will allow 1 of your drives to fail and still run. Then, when you get the new drive, pop it in and array will rebuild itself.

Thanks for the reply. What happens if I can't find a replacement drive exactly like the one that died? Don't I need an exact replacement for Raid setups?

Originally Posted by Peter_h

As far as rebuilding the array, it depends on the RAID controller. When I boot, it will tell me the status of the RAID Array just after post. I don't have to do anything, it will just alert that it is rebuilding and boot WHS like normal. It rebuids in the background while WHS is running. It doesn't take very long as the OS is only 20GB.

That's good to hear that it doesn't have any downtime. What Raid controller do you have that allows for this functionallity?

Thanks again,
Chuck

[Peter_h]

Originally Posted by crarbo1

Thanks for the reply. What happens if I can't find a replacement drive exactly like the one that died? Don't I need an exact replacement for Raid setups?

That's one of the reasons why I have a hot spare.

Originally Posted by crarbo1

That's good to hear that it doesn't have any downtime. What Raid controller do you have that allows for this functionallity?

I'm using the onboard RAID with my M/B.

On one occasion, i had to go into the RAID status page that displays after post and tell it to rebuild. The system rebooted and status was then displayed as "Rebuilding" and WHS loaded like normal. I then restarted after 20 min or so just to check on it and it then displayed as "Normal", so the Array was finished rebuilding in 20 min. Again, no real downtime as it was rebuilding while WHS was running.

[crarbo1]

Originally Posted by Peter_h

That's one of the reasons why I have a hot spare.

I'm using the onboard RAID with my M/B.

On one occasion, i had to go into the RAID status page that displays after post and tell it to rebuild. The system rebooted and status was then displayed as "Rebuilding" and WHS loaded like normal. I then restarted after 20 min or so just to check on it and it then displayed as "Normal", so the Array was finished rebuilding in 20 min. Again, no real downtime as it was rebuilding while WHS was running.

Peter,
Thanks again for your reply. I know I'm being a little over the top like this but in your scenario you have a hot spare. Great idea and probably will be adequate for a while. Since you have (3) Hard drives rotating the should last longer. Well if all three last for a year and then one day one of them dies. No big problem right away because you do have your hot spare. So now your down to two. So you go out to get another one to replace the bad one and find out they are discontinued. What do you do in that case? I know in theory, a person could have an large amount of hot spares but that isn't practical.

I will have to check out to see if my motherboard has the Raid feature.

If I was to go with raid now, on a fully functional WHS, what downtime would I have to get it set up with Raid 1 initially?

Thanks,
Chuck

[vexhold]

It doesnt have to be the same exact drive for it to work. The only problem you will have is that it will only use the same space as the other existing drive.

For example in Peter_h's case, he has a 20GB OS drive in RAID1. If he has a HD go bad and uses his hot spare he is fine. If it happens again he is somewhat in trouble as no one really makes 20GB HD's anymore. (Standard is 160GB now I think) He will be fine getting a 160GB drive to replace the bad one but when he does it will only use 20GB out of the 160GB.

Now the remaining 140GB is not lost. It is just not in the RAID set. This remaining storage can be set up as anything you wish. (usually JBOD)

Hope this helps.

[Peter_h]

Originally Posted by vexhold

It doesnt have to be the same exact drive for it to work. The only problem you will have is that it will only use the same space as the other existing drive.

For example in Peter_h's case, he has a 20GB OS drive in RAID1. If he has a HD go bad and uses his hot spare he is fine. If it happens again he is somewhat in trouble as no one really makes 20GB HD's anymore. (Standard is 160GB now I think) He will be fine getting a 160GB drive to replace the bad one but when he does it will only use 20GB out of the 160GB.

Now the remaining 140GB is not lost. It is just not in the RAID set. This remaining storage can be set up as anything you wish. (usually JBOD)

Hope this helps.

Exactly, However, I'm using 250GB drives.

The default OS partition created by WHS is 20GB.

[Peter_h]

Originally Posted by crarbo1

If I was to go with raid now, on a fully functional WHS, what downtime would I have to get it set up with Raid 1 initially?

The RAID Array has to be created before you install the OS. So if you want to RAID now, you are looking at a reinstall. There is no way to migrate your current install onto a RAID array.

[vexhold]

Exactly, However, I'm using 250GB drives.

Sorry, that wasnt mentioned earlier. Was assuming you had 20GB drvies and it work to help me explain better. No offense intended.

[Peter_h]

No offense taken.

[briands]

Originally Posted by Peter_h

The RAID Array has to be created before you install the OS. So if you want to RAID now, you are looking at a reinstall. There is no way to migrate your current install onto a RAID array.

Why couldn't he image his OS partition, create the array and then install the image onto the array?

[Peter_h]

He might be able to do that.

However, WHS does not play nicely with with multi drive setups and images. If he has an install on only one drive, he should be ok.

The problem is WHS is constantly balancing so if he makes an image, it will effectively be outdated in seconds.

So, he could shut down and image it and keep it off. Build the array and image on to the array and it might work. Otherwise, if he images and the drives have had any activity since the image, all hell will break loose and the drives will through data corruption errors.

Also, the only software that will image WHS due to the fact that it is built on top of Win2k3 server is Acronis True Image echo server. It is quite spendy. at $800.

[crarbo1]

Originally Posted by vexhold

It doesnt have to be the same exact drive for it to work. The only problem you will have is that it will only use the same space as the other existing drive.

For example in Peter_h's case, he has a 20GB OS drive in RAID1. If he has a HD go bad and uses his hot spare he is fine. If it happens again he is somewhat in trouble as no one really makes 20GB HD's anymore. (Standard is 160GB now I think) He will be fine getting a 160GB drive to replace the bad one but when he does it will only use 20GB out of the 160GB.

Now the remaining 140GB is not lost. It is just not in the RAID set. This remaining storage can be set up as anything you wish. (usually JBOD)

Hope this helps.

vexhold,
Thanks for that information. I was under the impression with any Raid configuration that you need to have matching drives. So if I understand you correctly as long as I don't have both drives fail there could be no downtime at all. I would just get a drive to replace the bad one, no matter the size or manufacturer, and rebuild the array. With the potential left over drive space I could add it to the pool. Good to know. I may go that direction then.

Originally Posted by Peter_h

The RAID Array has to be created before you install the OS. So if you want to RAID now, you are looking at a reinstall. There is no way to migrate your current install onto a RAID array.

Peter_h,
I sort of thought that would be the case. It would be reinstall, not a complete fresh install, right? How long would the reinstall take? How hard is it to set up the Raid 1, assuming my motherboard has that capability?

Thanks,
Chuck

[briands]

Originally Posted by Peter_h

He might be able to do that.

However, WHS does not play nicely with with multi drive setups and images. If he has an install on only one drive, he should be ok.

The problem is WHS is constantly balancing so if he makes an image, it will effectively be outdated in seconds.

So, he could shut down and image it and keep it off. Build the array and image on to the array and it might work. Otherwise, if he images and the drives have had any activity since the image, all hell will break loose and the drives will through data corruption errors.

Also, the only software that will image WHS due to the fact that it is built on top of Win2k3 server is Acronis True Image echo server. It is quite spendy. at $800.

Wow, that's not very friendly... does WHS have a migration tool like client based windows where you can export settings and files from an "old" machine, reinstall and import the settings into the "new" machine?

[Peter_h]

Originally Posted by briands

Wow, that's not very friendly... does WHS have a migration tool like client based windows where you can export settings and files from an "old" machine, reinstall and import the settings into the "new" machine?

The short answer, no. Microsofts stance is that you can always reinstall. Your data on all the pooled drives is safe.

So if you lose the OS, you are looking at OS reinstall, user accounts, and then everything else.

Microsoft is set to release PP2 for WHS very soon and my hope is that some type of settings migration is included.

[Peter_h]

Originally Posted by crarbo1

vexhold,Peter_h,
I sort of thought that would be the case. It would be reinstall, not a complete fresh install, right? How long would the reinstall take? How hard is it to set up the Raid 1, assuming my motherboard has that capability?

You could also look into getting a RAID card if your M/B doesn't support RAID. Building the RAID array doesn't really take any time. 5 min or so?

A reinstall is essentially a fresh install but the primary difference is that it will pick up your drives that are in your storage pool and readd them. A fresh install would format the drives.

The reinstall time depends on how much configuration you have done. Basically, how many add-ins do you have? How many programs did you install? Any tweaking that you did to the OS.

I highly suggest you take the time to slipstream your install. This will cut the reinstall drastically in the event the you need to reinstall again at a later date.

In fact, head on over to wegotserved.com and slipstream with the xfiles edition. http://forum.wegotserved.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=3937

This is basically an install package that a few of the members put together that will install most of the popular add-ins along with your WHS install. It's well worth the effort.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by briands

Wow, that's not very friendly... does WHS have a migration tool like client based windows where you can export settings and files from an "old" machine, reinstall and import the settings into the "new" machine?

It seems like in Microsoft's view that they don't really expect you to install any software on your WHS PC other than WHS - therefore it is not a big deal to do a reinstall. But this is not the case if you have Sage on your WHS machine.

[crarbo1]

Originally Posted by Peter_h

I highly suggest you take the time to slipstream your install. This will cut the reinstall drastically in the event the you need to reinstall again at a later date.

In fact, head on over to wegotserved.com and slipstream with the xfiles edition. http://forum.wegotserved.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=3937

This is basically an install package that a few of the members put together that will install most of the popular add-ins along with your WHS install. It's well worth the effort.

Peter_h,
Thanks for that link. I think I will use that when they get v1.3 done. I have a website that used PHP so having that and mySQL preloaded would make life a little easier.

Thanks,
Chuck

[something fishy]

I think that the lack of redundancy on the WHS system drive is a key weakness. Now that I have Sage and its associated xmltv scrapers (I live outside the US) on this HDD also. Reinstalling - the approved MS route – is, for me, an unacceptably clumsy solution.

My "fix" was to buy a Sil5744 based port multiplier - this will do hardware Raid1 that is transparent to the OS - no drivers are required. It is attached to the Marvell controller on my Mainboard as the boot drive.

I took an existing WHS install (the C and D drives on one 500Gb HDD) connected it to the first port on the 5744 set to Raid1 mode and booted up. The 5744 chip recognised this as a degraded array. A reboot with a brand new HDD in the second slot caused the 5744 to mirror the WHS system drive onto the new HDD with no intervention from me and it has been running as a Raid1 set ever since.

<WARNING !!! - I didn't expect it to be this painless, I only tried it because I had cloned the WHS system drive previously (connect the WHS drive as an external disk to a std WinXP machine to use “domestic” imaging programs). Do it at your peril and don't blame me if the 5744 chip wipes both HDDs as it creates the Raid1 array rather than magically mirroring it. But in my case I didn't need to reinstall>.

The 5744 will function as a boot drive without any drivers on the OS (it has hardware switches to set the Raid mode). However I installed the Sil Steelvine manager which enables me to see and control the Raid either from the WHS machine or my desktop PC - it can connect over a network. So far no problems.

The product that I am using is
http://www.addonics.com/products/hos...ad2sahpmeu.asp
And it is just velcroed to the bottom of my PC case (coolermaster stacker so lots of space) and powered from a floppy disk connector

Of course it goes without saying that Raid isn't backup - I have a clone of the OS drive also, but it makes me feel better about system drive vulnerability.

Eric

[gplasky]

Reinstall of WHS OS should take about an hour. (Depends on the speed of the machine) It's not that difficult. A reinstall of SageTV just requires a copy of your original SageTV directory. Install the drivers for any hardware. (Tuners, USB-UIRT) and you should have it back up in less than 2 hours. I your OS drive dies you will lose C and D. D for the most part contains your backups of your other machines. I make a copy of the SageTV directory. If you use Acronis and have a boot CD you should be able to make a copy of your WHS OS and D drive if you want. You just can't install the regular product on the server.

Gerry