I am currently running WHS 2011 using RAID 5 (RocketRAID 2720) with 5 Samsung (204s) 2TB drives without issues for the past 3 months. I am backing up WHS shares to another PC running Solaris Express 11 with 6 disks in RAIDZ2.
The SE11 box is fairly powerfull as it uses the SuperMicro Micro-ATX X9SCM-F with 16 GB of ECC memory which is overkill as a backup solution (although I also use the box to get ot know various LINUX distros) while the WHS 2011 box is an Intel mini-itx DH57JG with 8GB of memory (also overkill but doesn't hurt).
To make a long strory short. I am very impressed with the ZFZ filesystem & its snapshot capabilities which is far more robust than the windows NTFS files, e.g. no chkdsk needed & encryption built in, for example. Whether that really matters in the real works for a home system I am not sure but that is not that important right now.
What I am interested in is combing the best of both worlds. WHS2011 is hard to beat to backup WIN PCs while ZFS seems to be the most advanced and robust file system. Especially, the X9S mobo is underutilized given its hardware capabilities. Also, I would like to use the DH57JG as a HTPC and backup machine, but it is now running 24 hrs a day.
So what I like to do is to combine WHS2011 with SE11 into a single server. I would use the SuperMicro box with 16 GB memory to run SE11 with WHS2011 as VM. WHS would use two separates ZFS pools. One to back up WHS2011 to pool1 the other pool2 would contain all the WHS shares.
Q 1: Is this a good idea and if so what got-chas are there to think about?
Q 2: Are there better solutions? I suppose one could run SE 11 as a VM on top of WHS2011...
Thanks, Kurt.
The SE11 box is fairly powerfull as it uses the SuperMicro Micro-ATX X9SCM-F with 16 GB of ECC memory which is overkill as a backup solution (although I also use the box to get ot know various LINUX distros) while the WHS 2011 box is an Intel mini-itx DH57JG with 8GB of memory (also overkill but doesn't hurt).
To make a long strory short. I am very impressed with the ZFZ filesystem & its snapshot capabilities which is far more robust than the windows NTFS files, e.g. no chkdsk needed & encryption built in, for example. Whether that really matters in the real works for a home system I am not sure but that is not that important right now.
What I am interested in is combing the best of both worlds. WHS2011 is hard to beat to backup WIN PCs while ZFS seems to be the most advanced and robust file system. Especially, the X9S mobo is underutilized given its hardware capabilities. Also, I would like to use the DH57JG as a HTPC and backup machine, but it is now running 24 hrs a day.
So what I like to do is to combine WHS2011 with SE11 into a single server. I would use the SuperMicro box with 16 GB memory to run SE11 with WHS2011 as VM. WHS would use two separates ZFS pools. One to back up WHS2011 to pool1 the other pool2 would contain all the WHS shares.
Q 1: Is this a good idea and if so what got-chas are there to think about?
Q 2: Are there better solutions? I suppose one could run SE 11 as a VM on top of WHS2011...
Thanks, Kurt.