The Home Media Storage Gone Crazy Part 2

Well it has been two months since an update to this project has been posted. Here are the details thus far...


IBM X3650 Server with 10 GB RAM and 1 Quad-Core Xeon (X5355) Processor


The system is up and running nicely with Windows Server 2008 (thanks to the Heroes Happen Launch Event for supplying the license). Currently in its drive bays are 5 Western Digital 500GB RAID qualified SATA II hard drives and a random Seagate 500 GB. Two of the drives are in a hardware mirror and the others are in a software RAID 5.


The server is attached to a Promise 15110 SCSI to SATA array. This unit has room for 15 drives and a nice web gui interface to manage it. The server has an Adaptec 39160 PCIX adapter to connect with the array.


Currently the array has 5 Western Digital 1 TB Green SATA II and 5 of the Western Digital 500 GB like the server. Both sets are in RAID 5 configurations presently but that will change as the experiments start.

The Host system (Windows 2008 Server 64 bit) is running Hyper-V and has several virtual machines on it. Two destop emulations, one running Windows XP SP3 the other running Vista Business SP1. There are three servers residing in the virtual environment, a Windows 2003 Standard, a Windows 2003 trial, and a Windows 2003 Web (all licenses are thanks to an Action Pack Subscription).

The Windows 2003 Standard is acting like a storage server. The trial will be using DoubleTake Software the migrate an older SBS2003 server. While the Web is just there to be a server as needed.


As everything is now getting online we've got some initial observations;

Machine transfer speeds aren't any better over the "virtual" network than those over the copper wire.

Windows Media Center takes a long time (sometimes nearly 2 minutes) to parse 200+ DVD's.

A virtual desktop is just as good as the real thing if all you've done is remoted in to it anyway. (Actually its better one less computer to draw power)

We'll be back soon to write a summary of the SBS2003 DoubleTake migration.

Submitted by Alexander (Chief Geek)