Sadly, today Microsoft announced that they would be ceasing development of the Drive Extender feature that was to be part of SBS 2011 Essentials and the new Windows Home Server version. No – Microsoft are NOT cancelling SBS 2001 Essentials OR Windows Home Server, but they are removing what I consider to be a key feature to those products. They announced it today here on their blog.
Why would they do this? Honestly – only Microsoft know. What I know is that I’m disappointed that the feature is gone, particularly from the Home Server product as this was a very cool way to easily expand your drive storage pools without needing to have drives all of the same size. From what I saw, it worked pretty darn well in Windows Home Server v1 – sure there was a hiccup with storing certain types of data on it, but for music, videos and photos it seemed to work pretty well indeed.
What do we do now? Well – we do what we have always done. We use either Software RAID built into Windows Server that underlies all of this (yuck) or Hardware RAID to give us the protection we need for our drives.
I know that a few of my fellow MVPs were told of this recently and sworn to secrecy under our NDA, and we honestly were dumbstruck as to the fact it had been cancelled. I can only assume that the powers that be at Microsoft know what they are truly doing by removing this feature. On the flip side however, it means that any server backup or antivirus product that worked with Windows Server 2008 R2 will now most certainly work with SBS 2011 Essentials without modification! See – there is a silver lining there somewhere 
I agree, bit of a bummer. But keep in mind this was removed because ‘we have received feedback from partners and customers about how they use storage today and how they plan to use it moving forward’ http://ow.ly/3eBNi
Hi Brad,
I hear you… I often wonder which partners and customers Microsoft are talking to because the ones I talk to have a different view on the world. I particularly think that removing Drive Extender from the Home Server (Vail) product is a major blow to the future success of that product. Still – regardless of my thoughts, I can do nothing about it and must continue to sell and promote what Microsoft make available. I’ve given my very strong feedback on this issue to the people internally at Microsoft and can do no more. Such is life.
Thanks for taking the time to comment mate.
Wayne
I absolutely agree with you Wayne and appreciate your advocacy (and the other MVPs as well) on behalf of the rest of us who serve the SMB market. Our partners and customers must know your partners and customers as the feedback we receive is the same, yet apparently they aren’t consulted either.
I absolutely agree with you Wayne and appreciate your advocacy (and the other MVPs as well) on behalf of the rest of us who serve the SMB market. Our partners and customers must know your partners and customers as the feedback we receive is the same, yet apparently they aren’t consulted either.
Ken