Having transitioned from Windows Home Server 2011 to
Windows Server 2012
Essentials RC, and then from that to the final version of Essentials
2012, I thought I’d provide a few notes about my experience doing so.
Note
that this is not a complete guide to migrating to Windows Server 2012
Essentials. These are instead some notes and observations, based on my
own experiences, about the process of moving from previous home
office/small business server—in my case, Windows Home Server 2011, to
Essentials.
Up front, however, a few warnings.
These
products, WHS 2011 and Essentials 2012, and also related releases like
WHS v1, and Small Business Server Essentials 2011, were designed
primarily as first server/single server solutions. They’re basically
plug and play appliances that exist outside of the normal Windows
Server/Windows client way of doing things, and while that brings with it
many ramifications, the big one for purposes of this article regards
upgrading: There isn’t any traditional upgrade path from previous
servers (WHS/SBSE 2011) to Essentials 2012.
Second,
remember that there may be no huge reason to move to Essentials from
whatever home/small business server you’re currently using. If the
server is sitting there working, doing PC backups, and serving up your
stuff, why mess with something good?
Finally,
this you’re data we’re talking about here. If you’re really using one
of these products as the center of your own environment, and storing
your important personal and/or professional data on it, you very
specifically want to be careful about backing up that data
first. Just because something worked for me, as noted below, doesn’t mean you should do it without backing up first. Be careful.
OK, here’s what I’ve done.
Migration 1: WHS 2011 to Essentials 2012 Beta/RC
For about 18 months or so, I based my own environment around Windows Home Server 2011. I wrote about that transition in
I'm Betting on Windows Home Server 2011, and about that product, generally, in
Windows Home Server 2011.
WHS
2011 worked just fine and the only reason I’m moving forward to
Essentials 2012 now is that I need to keep up on the latest
technologies. The key word in that sentence, however, is “now”, in that I
could have simply kept using WHS 2011. But Essentials 2012 is
absolutely a no compromises Windows Server versions, as noted in
my recent review of the product, with lots of very interesting functionality that’s not present in WHS. (That said, I did briefly flirt with using
Windows 8 as a replacement for Windows Home Server: See
Replace Windows Home Server ... With Windows 8? for the rundown on that choice.)
If
you’ve been following along with my evolving use of various servers,
you may recall that my WHS 2011 was a repurposed PC tower that had
several terabytes of internal storage attached to it. I was using a
single 3 TB USB 3.0-based external hard drive with Server Backup for
onsite data replication (everything but videos) and
Crashplan for offsite backup of everything.
Because
I wanted to maintain the WHS 2011 install alongside a test Essentials
2012 server running first the Beta and then the Release Candidate (RC)
version of that latter system, I installed Essentials on an excellent
and highly recommended
HP MicroServer
that I had upgraded over time with 8 GB of RAM (up from 2 GB). Like the
original HP home servers, this neat little box features four SATA drive
bays (non-hot-swappable, not that such a thing matters in a home
office/SMB scenario) and even a couple of expansion ports.
I
don’t recall the exact process, but over a period of time I
experimented with Windows Server 2012 Beta/RC and Storage Spaces on this
box, using two 3 TB hard disks, and trying to figure out whether there
was any point in using ReFS over NTFS. After not seeing a real world
difference on this box, I decided on the known—NTFS—and when Essentials
Beta hit, that became the test box. By the time the RC arrived, I had
decked out the server with a third 3 TB drive, in addition to the other
two and the 250 GB boot disk.
For
the Beta version of Essentials 2012, I simply wanted to test the server
and make sure it worked as expected, copying over some subset of the
data on my WHS 2011 server. This was a simple and manual network copy,
something that ran once overnight, and it let me test client and
external connectivity.
By the time
the RC version of Essentials 2012 arrived, I figured I’d be able to do a
simple migration to the RTM version later, so I started the process of
moving completely to Essentials. This involved a wipe and reload of the
OS (using the RC version this time), and configuring the storage exactly
how I wanted it. And that’s a story in its own right.
Like
its predecessors, Essentials 2012 requires a boot disk that’s at least
160 GB in size. By default, the server creates a set series of server
folders, which are essentially (ahem) shares that clients can access on
the local network. By default, there are five—Client Computer Backups,
Company, File History Backups, Folder Redirection and Users—and if you
enable media sharing, you’ll see four others: Music, Pictures, Recorded
TV and Videos. So this boot disk will include the whole shebang: The
hidden system reserved partition plus the C: drive with Windows and all
those server folders.
Essentials doesn’t like a single disk
configuration and the Best Practices Analyzer will quickly start
bothering you via Alert Viewer that “one or more server folders are
located on the system hard drive.”
Of course, I didn’t need BPA to tell me
that a single disk configuration is not just bad but unacceptable. And
my plan all along was to use that 9 TB of space, spread out over three 3
TB disks, as efficiently as possible. That way, my data would be
separated from the OS, physically. And my most important data would be
replicated on two different physical hard drives. Both of these changes,
combined with offsite cloud backup, give me the peace of mind I need.
And
while there are different ways to handle this, I created a storage pool
and storage space using two of those disks in a mirrored configuration.
That is, while the two disks combined provide about 6 TB of space, the
storage space actually looks like 3 TB of space to the system. It’s just
that everything in there is duplicated across both drives. This space,
which I inventively call “Storage Space” and assigned to drive letter
S:, contains all of the server folders except for Videos. The third 3 TB
drive, which is not replicated, was assigned drive letter V: (go
figure) and is used solely for videos.
Once
these configuration changes were made, I added a single 3 TB external
hard drive, as with the WHS box, for use with Server Backup. The new
disk layout resembles the following:
From here, it was a simple matter of
copying over the data from the WHS 2011-based server—which took quite a
while, as I used a combination of network file copy and a portable hard
disk to make it happen—and setting up Server Backup to use the external
drive.
Once the file copy
was done and I checked the file counts and sizes to ensure I’d copied
everything successfully, I switched over to the new server, MICRO, while
leaving the old one, VAIL, online for the time being. My use of WHS and
now Essentials 2012 may differ a bit from yours, but for me it’s mostly
a data store, and then for data that I’m not accessing regularly
anymore. This includes both work-based data and personal photos, home
videos, and other files dating back over 15 years. For my daily
workflow, I use SkyDrive to replicate files between PCs and as articles
or article series are completed or retired, they get moved up to the
server. So it was a simple matter to start using MICRO rather than VAIL.
Between
Essentials 2012 RC and RTM, two things changed. First, I started
backing up MICRO to Crashplan as I had been doing with VAIL. And after
ensuring that MICRO worked as expected and could be accessed when I was
away (via
LogMeIn Hamachi
in my case, though others can of course use the product’s built-in
remote access functionality) from home, I eventually just switched off
VAIL, but left it set up just in case. Worse case, if MICRO failed, I’d
be able to restart VAIL and have lost very little if any data.
And then Microsoft RTM’d Essentials 2012.
Migration 2: Essentials 2012 RC to Essentials 2012 RTM Eval/GA
As
noted previously, I’d migrated to the RC version of Windows Server 2012
Essentials. Crashplan was partway through backing up my non-video data
(i.e. the important stuff). VAIL was offline. And then Essentials 2012
was finalized, and Microsoft provided me with an evaluation version of
the software so I could write a review.
(Actually,
it was the final version of the software with an evaluation product
key. So I figured I could eventually use the Windows Activation software
to apply a full RTM product key and remove the evaluation timeout. This
assumption proved correct.)
How do you make such a migration?
Pretty easily, as it turns out. Not as easily as I had bet, but easily enough.
Since
I had offloaded all my important data to S: (a storage space) and my
videos to V: (a single hard disk), I knew I’d be able to simply wipe out
the primary disk, install the RTM version of Essentials 2012, and then
re-configure the server folders to the appropriate locations.
I
knew too, from previous experience, that storage spaces are incredibly
malleable. You can remove one disk or all of the disks from a space,
plug it (or them) into another Windows 8 PC or Windows Server 2012
server, and the contents will be immediately and seamlessly available.
Even better, the storage space survives the move intact. This meant that
the S: drive I created, with all its data, would simply be there after
installing the RTM version of Essentials 2012. I’d just have to connect
everything up again through the Dashboard.
This worked almost exactly as expected. There was just one wrinkle.
The
install went fine, and as with previous installs, Essentials 2012 had
all of the server folders configured on the C: drive. So the first order
of business was getting S: and V: online and moving the appropriate
server folders to the appropriate drives. The next stop was Disk
Management (WINKEY + X, Disk Management), where I changed the drive
letters on the storage space and videos drive to be S: and V:,
respectively. The next step was to use the Dashboard’s Storage/Server
Folders interface to manually move each server folder to the right
location.
I figured this would be as
simple as selecting the folder (say, Users), choosing the right
location in the wizard (S:) and then clicking OK. And it was, except for
that one wrinkle. Detecting that a folder of the same name already
existed on the destination drive, the Move a Folder wizard inexplicably
wouldn’t allow me to merge the contents of the two folders (the source,
which was empty, and the destination, which had all my data). So I had
to go through a dumb but simple enough process where I renamed the
folders on the storage space and videos folders (to Users2, Videos2, and
so on), moved each server folder location from the Dashboard, moved the
contents between the old locations (Users2, etc.) to the new locations
(Users, etc.) and then deleted the old locations. Yes, really.
At
least it was simple. And sure enough, once it was done, everything was
up and running as before. Even Crashplan had a nice surprise for me:
Reinstalling the software, it noted a feature by which you can associate
a new backup with a previous one. So it examined the current backup set
(basically C: and S:), compared it to what was previously backed up,
and just started backing up the new stuff. Nice!
A few more notes
Now,
if you’re using Windows Home Server today, you may have noticed that
this migration of mine involved only data, the files and folders I’m
storing on the server and sharing via server folders. That is, I didn’t
migrate PC backups, which is a concern for many of you, based on my
email. While I don’t personally use the centralized PC backup feature in
Essentials (or, previously, in WHS), my advice on this count: Start
over when it comes to PC backups.
Ideally,
you’ll be using a different server, and while I understand that’s not
always possible you will want, at the very least, to have everything on
that server—including the PC backups—backed up to external drives per my
original warnings. The data on PCs is important, sure. But backups are
only sort of important, and can and should be redone if you’ve re-made
your infrastructure with Essentials 2012.
Aside
from the actual migration of data, I of course have configured other
aspects of the server, including media sharing, domain connectivity,
centralized File History backups for my Windows 8 clients, and so on.
I’ve written about these features in other articles in my ongoing series
about Windows Server 2012 Essentials, and of course there’s a lot more
to discuss. But moving from a previous home office/small business server
like WHS 2011 to Essentials 2012 probably has to be time consuming, but
it doesn’t have to be hard. But in my own experience, what I’ve arrived
at is a superset of what I started with: A home office infrastructure
based on Essentials 2012 instead of WHS 2011. Much of what I do is
identical to before—file sharing, media sharing and remote access—but
there are new, very interesting features that come along courtesy of the
Windows Server 2012 base in Essentials, including Storage Spaces and
File History integration, and of course the domain stuff which was
absent in WHS.
Depending on your needs, this article may have raised more questions than answers. But again, this is an ongoing conversation.
Let me know
what I didn’t cover, or what you still have questions about, and I’ll
see if I can’t answer any questions in future articles in this series.
(
Source)
