Nerdy fun times
Well, my second external hard drive enclosure came in today. So, step 1 was to setup one of my extra drives so that I could use it with storage spaces. Sadly, there was no 'nice' way of doing this since most of my external drives came from one active system or another at one point and contained drives with recovery partitions and all sorts of other things that just cause the Storage Space Manager to barf. In addition to it being unable to handle it via the UI, it throws no useful errors and then creates the pool anyway with the valid drives, which in this case was a single drive... for a mirrored pool. Fail. Anyway, hoping that will be sorted out before this product is GA'd even though I shouldn't have to deal with it again any time soon (providing no 2 of my 2 external + and 1 backup drives don't die on me any time soon).
But, that was just a diversion and only held me up about 5 minutes while I jogged my memory on DISKPART. Then I had the storage space setup. And began the slow process of dumping my files onto it. Not a very exciting 2 hours there. My drives were old 5400 RPM drives connected by USB 2.0, and I was copying a constant stream of files making for likely more overhead on the mirroring part than is perhaps useful.
And this is the point where I started doing things in the wrong order, but it gave me a chance to mess with RDP which was definitely a good experience. Now that I had my storage space, and had my data on it, and had mapped a folder with which I had read/write permissions on and then mapped that as a network drive on a development machine, I went and moved my file server to the basement.
At this point I wanted to try installing TFS Express and dumping the database onto my storage space so I could get some free redundancy for that data (backups take time/effort, and backing them up onto non-redundant disks always seemed like a half-assed measure). But with the PC in the basement and me on a couch upstairs, there was a problem with my plan. First thing was, RDP wasn't configured on my server yet. Fortunately, I had splashtop installed on the server and on my iPad and enabled RDP that way. On a side note... damn is RDP ever much faster and nicer in Windows 8. I'm sure I will eventually find some reserved keys that are sent your local PC instead of being sent to the remote session, but during the course of my messing around, I didn't hit any. Couple that with the speedy response times and I really couldn't tell I was in an RDP session most of the time. That is a huge departure from my daily encounters with RDP.
Once I had RDP I was able to download and install TFS Express Beta. But hit my first 'bug' with Storage Spaces. My server is actually a 4 year old XPS Laptop. And it chokes on boot-up with the Storage Space drives connected. I'm not trying to boot from them which I already know doesn't work from various blog, but seems like it hits an infinite loop, either that or it just says "I don't know what the F*** to do with these things, perhaps if I stick around the problem will go away". Whatever is actually going on during this phase of booting, it means that when I reboot I need to unplug the USB drives until control is handed to the OS. Thus re-inforcing the fact that one should never go out of their way to move their server into a room further away until you are completely done configuring it.
So, a few more installs and reboot later and I finally have everything setup. All in all, it really wasn't that much effort, but felt like it because I had to make numerous trips to the basement. Biggest time waste was that TFS and SQLExpress installs are SLOOOW, about which not much can be. Couple those with the large downloads and while it was fairly simple it has taken most of my night. The only other hitch took another 5 seconds of my time, and that was moving the DB from the default location to the storage space.
But! Finally! I am there. I was even able to hook my dev laptop into my 'Server' TFS instance and upload some code and do some check-ins.
And the important thing in this whole experience is that everything actually, oddly, worked out exactly as I had hoped it might. Which is a bit of a surprise when you're considering that I just mixed a completely new feature (Storage Spaces), with a completely new product (TFS Express) in a configuration which is new to me and it all went off quite easily. I actually have to tip my hat to MS for this one. That Storage Spaces work as seamlessly in this environment as they do is nothing short of impressive. Automagical even.
So, now I have a thinly provisioned 10 TB Storage Pool backed by 2 drives (250 and 320 GB) in a mirrored configuration. And now that I have proven the concept... I think the next step is get some less pathetic drives (at least 1 TB each) in enclosures that support USB 3.0, and then some time down the road, obviously upgrading to a PC with USB 3.0 ports.
But, that was just a diversion and only held me up about 5 minutes while I jogged my memory on DISKPART. Then I had the storage space setup. And began the slow process of dumping my files onto it. Not a very exciting 2 hours there. My drives were old 5400 RPM drives connected by USB 2.0, and I was copying a constant stream of files making for likely more overhead on the mirroring part than is perhaps useful.
And this is the point where I started doing things in the wrong order, but it gave me a chance to mess with RDP which was definitely a good experience. Now that I had my storage space, and had my data on it, and had mapped a folder with which I had read/write permissions on and then mapped that as a network drive on a development machine, I went and moved my file server to the basement.
At this point I wanted to try installing TFS Express and dumping the database onto my storage space so I could get some free redundancy for that data (backups take time/effort, and backing them up onto non-redundant disks always seemed like a half-assed measure). But with the PC in the basement and me on a couch upstairs, there was a problem with my plan. First thing was, RDP wasn't configured on my server yet. Fortunately, I had splashtop installed on the server and on my iPad and enabled RDP that way. On a side note... damn is RDP ever much faster and nicer in Windows 8. I'm sure I will eventually find some reserved keys that are sent your local PC instead of being sent to the remote session, but during the course of my messing around, I didn't hit any. Couple that with the speedy response times and I really couldn't tell I was in an RDP session most of the time. That is a huge departure from my daily encounters with RDP.
Once I had RDP I was able to download and install TFS Express Beta. But hit my first 'bug' with Storage Spaces. My server is actually a 4 year old XPS Laptop. And it chokes on boot-up with the Storage Space drives connected. I'm not trying to boot from them which I already know doesn't work from various blog, but seems like it hits an infinite loop, either that or it just says "I don't know what the F*** to do with these things, perhaps if I stick around the problem will go away". Whatever is actually going on during this phase of booting, it means that when I reboot I need to unplug the USB drives until control is handed to the OS. Thus re-inforcing the fact that one should never go out of their way to move their server into a room further away until you are completely done configuring it.
So, a few more installs and reboot later and I finally have everything setup. All in all, it really wasn't that much effort, but felt like it because I had to make numerous trips to the basement. Biggest time waste was that TFS and SQLExpress installs are SLOOOW, about which not much can be. Couple those with the large downloads and while it was fairly simple it has taken most of my night. The only other hitch took another 5 seconds of my time, and that was moving the DB from the default location to the storage space.
But! Finally! I am there. I was even able to hook my dev laptop into my 'Server' TFS instance and upload some code and do some check-ins.
And the important thing in this whole experience is that everything actually, oddly, worked out exactly as I had hoped it might. Which is a bit of a surprise when you're considering that I just mixed a completely new feature (Storage Spaces), with a completely new product (TFS Express) in a configuration which is new to me and it all went off quite easily. I actually have to tip my hat to MS for this one. That Storage Spaces work as seamlessly in this environment as they do is nothing short of impressive. Automagical even.
So, now I have a thinly provisioned 10 TB Storage Pool backed by 2 drives (250 and 320 GB) in a mirrored configuration. And now that I have proven the concept... I think the next step is get some less pathetic drives (at least 1 TB each) in enclosures that support USB 3.0, and then some time down the road, obviously upgrading to a PC with USB 3.0 ports.
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