Posts Tagged ‘Western Digital’

WD DX 4000 – Software Update Available v1.5.7.30

Tuesday, January 8th, 2013

I’ve been away for a few days and came back to find that my WD Sentinel DX4000 has software updates available for it.  You can do the update manually or enable it to do automatic updates.  Personally I prefer to do manual updates on a number of my key servers so that I can review what has changed prior to installing the update.  You can check out what is now in the v1.5.7.30 update here.

Upon reviewing the above mentioned PDF, I can see that they recommend I have a specific Microsoft Update Rollup 4 (MS KB #2757013) installed before I do this WD update.  Glad I checked as whilst I did have this update installed, I’m not sure what would have happened had I let it do it’s thing automatically.  You can force download and install of the update from the Monitor Tab on the Dashboard as you can see below.  Installation takes maybe 5 to 10 minutes once it’s downloaded and it will need a reboot after it’s done (which it does automatically).

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The big new feature in this release is that it adds the ability for the WD Sentinel to act as an iSCSI target which many people have asked for. They have incorporated the iSCSI support from StarWind and have even got a cool dashboard add in that you can see below.

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From the Dashboard, you can quickly create iSCSI targets and then have iSCSI clients connect to them.  I’ll do some performance comparisons later of this vs. my QNAP so you can get a guideline of the difference.

Overall – this upgrade went smoothly for me on one of my two WD DX 4000 Sentinel units.  The other one (my main production one which I did 2nd) lost the ability to pickup a DHCP IP address after the reboot.  I had two WD supplied cables connect it to my Netgear switch. I tried many different things, and in the end replaced BOTH network cables with new cables – it now works fine.  I can’t see why the cables don’t work as they did before the upgrade and both cables work fine with other laptops.  Further testing shows the WD cables don’t work now with EITHER of my WD Sentinel units… One of my units uses the cables supplied by WD, the other is using a single cable I’ve supplied on my own.  It appears for now, I need to replace the cables with alternate cables so that my systems can continue to function.  I’m going to take this up with WD as it should not be like this Sad smile

I am looking forward to playing wit the iSCSI functionality and will do some performance tests later compared to my QNAP.

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Performance testing Windows based NAS devices

Thursday, August 16th, 2012

Following on from last nights article about Performance Testing of non Windows based NAS devices, tonight, I’ll give you some results of some of the NAS devices that are based on Windows.  As I said last night, this is all about getting a general feel for the performance of these devices vs categorical winners and losers and it’s based on what I happen to have in my lab / production network right now.

Currently I’ve got the following devices in my environment.

Here’s the results of my testing

Device

Time

Speed

Buffalo TerraStation Pro WSS

36m 10s

60.63MB/s

HP Microserver

29m 56s

69.10 MB/s

WD Sentinel DX 4000

33m 16s

59.72MB.s

Not sure what I can draw from these results other than they are all pretty similar all in all.

I’m busy testing Windows Servers right now for the next post Smile

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Performance Testing non Windows based NAS devices

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012

I decided to do some very basic performance testing of non Windows based NAS devices that I’ve got here at in my lab / production network.  The aim of this is not to come up with a winner or loser, but to understand what levels of performance I might expect from these NAS devices. I’ll break this testing up into two categories, and tonight’s blog post will feature the non Windows based NAS devices I have.  A future blog post will focus on Windows based NAS devices as well as Windows based Servers.

Currently I’ve got the following devices in my environment.

Now I’m going to start of by saying that these tests are NOT equal.  Aside from the source machine being my desktop PC, and using ShadowProtect to backup the C: drive, there are many other variations to the configuration.  The intention on this is NOT to give categorical winner/loser, but to get a feel for performance.  I configured an SMB share on each of the devices and then used ShadowProtect to backup my desktop to it.  My desktop has around 121GB data on it’s C: drive, so it’s a good candidate for an average desktop.

Ok – so the results of the test are as follows

Device

Time

Speed

WD MyBookLive

45m 1s

45.68MB/s

QNAP TS410

55m 19s

37.36MB/s

Buffalo Link Station

48m 48s

45.26MB/s

 

What does this tell me?  Well in all likelihood if you want the fastest backup, then a single drive is probably the way to go.  Any form of RAID seems to lessen the performance a little, but interestingly the Buffalo did well with a 3 drive RAID5 array – that surprised me.

So – there you have it – some idea of how fast you can expect from some of these devices when used as a ShadowProtect target.  There’s quite a few other tests that I plan to do with this such as using them as FTP targets for ImageManager, but that will come later.

If any vendor out there wants to loan me a device for testing, I’m more than happy to put it through it’s paces Smile

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How to backup your WD Sentinel DX 4000?

Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

One of the challenges that I’ve had with my 12TB WD Sentinel DX 4000 is how to go about backing it up.  You see Microsoft only designed the inbuilt backup utility to handle up to 2TB of space, yet my WD Sentinel has 8.12TB of data storage capacity as you can see below.

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Likewise, as you can see, I have almost filled it with lots of data, so losing something could be a real problem for me.

The solution I’m using is actually quite simple.  I’ve attached 2 x WD MyBook 3TB drives to the external USB 3 ports.  I’ve then installed BackupAssist and am using it to do the backup of selected folders to the drives.  I’ve split my backups so that half the folders will go to one drive and the other half will go to the other drive.  BackupAssist gives me the chance to use the many different methods to backup my data, but I’ve found that the File Replication engine is the best for this type of backup. 

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What this backup does is protect my data, should I have some major corruption of the RAID array, or in case of fire (I take the 3TB Mybook drives offsite and swap them regularly).  In the event that the unit is destroyed in some way, I’d get a new unit and restore just the data to it.  I’ve tested this and it works just fine Smile  No more 2TB backup limit!

After each nightly backup, you have the option of having a status report emailed to you.  One of the parts I like about this is the Media Usage Report which shows just how much space is free/used on your destination media.

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If you are interested in BackupAssist you can check out their website here

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WD Sentinel DX 4000 – Initializing

Thursday, June 21st, 2012

Yesterday, my WD Sentinel DX 4000 appeared to have locked up – it had stopped responding to the front panel buttons. I wondered why it had done this and then I found I had inadvertently taken it off the UPS when I re-cabled some things the other day and I suspect we had a power fluctuation which caused it to glitch. Anyway – the only way to resolve this was to hard power it. Now this is something that you normally SHOULD NOT DO to any computer, least of all a server like this. But it was my only choice.

After the reboot, I found that the front panel had advised that it was Initializing…. now at first I panicked and thought that it was erasing and initialising everything on the server. I was however able to RDP to the server and verify that my data was there. I left it and after 8 hours, it was up to 5% done. I also noticed that anything I tried to do via RDP on the DX 4000 was very slow as well. I figured that the initialisation process was very disk intensive, so I left it at that. I’d heard of this before and wondered what it all meant. I sent an email off to some people I know at WD to get some answers. Given it was late at night, and me being impatient, I later decided to reboot the server and found that it seemed to be far more responsive, however the Initializing process continued at it’s normal rate. Given my data was not at risk, and that performance seemed to be fine, this didn’t bother me.

This morning, my status was as below on the front panel.

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You can see via the Dashboard, that it’s showing much the same thing – all disks are normal and my data is intact.

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Ok – so the official explanation of what is going on here.

This is normal behaviour for the WD Sentinel DX 4000 under the following circumstances:

I know that WD are aware of the issue and they are looking into ways to better handle this in advance of any unclean shutdown. They have assured me that the chances of data loss are quite minimal provided I allow the initialization process to complete – which of course I am doing.

Oh – I forgot to mention – I’ve moved this back over to the UPS so that it won’t experience any unplanned failures again.

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WD DX 4000–Software Update Available

Thursday, May 31st, 2012

I really like my WD Sentinel DX 4000 – it’s great little product for me and I’ve actually got two of them in the SBSfaq.com offices.  I walked into the office this morning though to see the display below on them “Software Update Available”.  This is cool and I’d love it if my normal servers would do the same – makes it nice and simple to see what is going on.

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Ok – so it needs an update – I decided to dig into it some more to see what that really means – after all this is the first time I’ve seen this displayed on this system.

I checked the alerts first up and as you can see below, there’s a WD Sentinel Software Update Available – unfortunately though it does not tell me much about how to get the update applied.  Maybe that can improve there and give me more information.

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So I did some digging into it.  After a little bit, on the Monitor tab of the Dashboard, I found the screen below.  I found that if I clicked on the “Check for Updates” button that it would come back and tell me that there were updates available, and it would then give me the option to download and install the updates.  It warned me that it would need to do a reboot when it did this, so I went ahead and told it to proceed.

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Whilst it was doing the update, it displayed “Updating Software” on the front LCD panel of the WD Sentinel – a nice touch for sure.  The entire process took maybe 5 to 10 minutes and it rebooted – I noticed it was up again when it showed me the normal LCD screen.

I logged on to the Dashboard and checked the versions and sure enough – it’s updated.

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I checked WD’s website and found out they have a list of fixes here in a PDF file.

Ok – so a few suggestions for WD.

1. Use the Alert to show me where to go and what to do to make the update happen.  I don’t want to have to dig around for it

2. Why not have the LCD panel ALSO alert me to when there are Windows Updates available for it?

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Where can I get support for my WD DX 4000 Sentinel?

Thursday, April 12th, 2012

There’s an online support forum available here which seems to have a reasonable bit of traffic.

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Computer Monitoring Error since BPA Installed

Friday, February 24th, 2012

Since I installed the latest BPA on my Western Digital DX 4000 which has Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials on it, I’ve had the alerting pop up with a Computer Monitoring Error as you can see in the screen shot below.  This alert pops up on all the client machines that are connected to the server.  I’m not the only one to have seen this however, a number of fellow MVPs have seen this too.  Together we’ve figured out that the latest Best Practice Analyzer (BPA) is the culprit and that removing it from the server has “resolved” this issue for the moment.  Microsoft are aware of the issue and are investigating it at the moment.

This error also occurs on other servers that use the same Best Practice Analyzer including SBS 2011 Essentials and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials. 

I’ll report back here once I know of a solution – for now, I suggest that you install the BPA and then after you’ve run it to determine the health of your server and rectified anything that needs to be fixed, remove the BPA.

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SBS Best Practice Analyser updated this week

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012

Well the tool was called the SBS Best Practices Analyser (Analyzer for the US guys) but it’s been called the Windows Server Solutions BPA since it was re-released for the SBS 2011 platform.

Microsoft have released an update for this just this week.  They announced it here.  The BPA works on SBS 2011 Standard Edition, SBS 2011 Essentials, Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials and Windows MultiPoint Server 2011.

It’s 100% best practice to run this tool over any new installation that we do as well as any new site we inherit as it really helps to see if there are issues that we can solve quickly that Microsoft already know about.  Get the update now and check it out.

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WD Sentinel – Small Office NAS and Backup for SMB Clients

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

I’ve had the pleasure of having a WD Sentinel running in the SBSfaq.com office network here for the last 2 months.  The WD Sentinel was released late last year by Western Digital as their first device focused around Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials.  I’ve been given the DX 4000 model which has 2 x 2TB drives in it to review although they have other models as well.  The WD Sentinel DX 4000 is basically a NAS on steroids.  It’s based on Window Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials (WSSe) and includes all the cool things that WSSe has to offer.  It’s designed to support up to 25 users for file access to the server as well as a pretty cool backup facility for up to 25 PCs or Laptops.

From the outside, the WD Sentinel DX 4000 has an LCD panel on the front with up / down controls, a power button, a few LEDs for status of the unit and the individual drives and a door to protect the hard drives.  The hard drives can be easily removed and installed without the need for any tools at all. In fact, Western Digital have even built in an eject mechanism into the drives to cleanly disconnect them should you need to remove a drive due to failure.

wdfWDSentinel Drive Out

On the rear of the unit, you will find 2 power supply ports (only one power supply comes as standard), 2 LAN ports and 2 x USB 3.0 ports.  There is also a reset button that can be used as part of the process to restore this unit back to factory defaults.

wdfWDSentinel Rear

Out of the box, the DX 4000 requires no monitor, keyboard or mouse.  In fact there’s no where to plug any of those things in.  That’s because it’s designed to operate as a headless device from the start.  This is where it gets “tricky” as most SMB IT Professionals will expect to connect these things to it.  Simply connect the DX 4000 to your LAN, plug in power and within a few minutes it will acquire an IP address and display it on the front panel.  The paper quick start guide that is in the box works seamlessly guiding you through it.  It takes around 26 minutes to setup from this point, and once it’s finalised, it’s ready to go.  You can then add this to your domain if you have an SBS network or similar or leave it in it’s own workgroup – either way it’s easy setup.  You get access to the WSSe console from the desktop and can then see all the configuration options for it including setting up user access, shared folders and even monitoring things like the CPU temperature on the system.  Once it’s done, for the diehard SMB IT Professionals, you can connect to the server via RDP if you like and see it like a normal Windows Server.

Redundancy – the unit comes with a single power supply, but you can optionally purchase a 2nd unit and therefore provide a degree of fault tolerance not seen on low end NAS devices like this.  In addition, the 2 Network connections are teamed automatically to provide redundancy and will automatically use whichever one is connected without user intervention.  Depending on the unit that you purchase, you will have either 2 or 4 drives in it.  My unit had 2 x 2TB drives in it and this was configured as a RAID 1 or mirror set from the factory using the on-board RAID controller.  If you purchase a unit with 4 drives, it’s automatically configured as a RAID 5 array.  The big thing here is that your data is protected from the start from a single drive failure.  The drives used in the WD Sentinel are from Western Digitals RAID series drives – not the cheaper desktop drives that many low end NAS units use.

Growth Potential – whilst my unit came with 2 x 2TB drives in it, I elected to install an additional 2 drives to it.  Normally this process is painful in normal servers as you need to manually do a heap of work to make it all work.  Not so with the DX 4000.  Once I installed the additional 2 x 2TB drives, the WD Sentinel automatically commenced expanding itself onto those new drives.  In the process it also changed the RAID configuration from RAID 1 to RAID 5 which gives better performance for the unit too.  During this process, I played the average user and did nothing.  I didn’t NEED to do a thing because it handled it all.  The conversion from 2 drives in RAID 1 to 4 drives in RAID 5 took just over 24 hours which is fair enough – during this time however I didn’t really notice a thing.  This is a set and forget device in that respect for sure and I could even walk my mother through doing this remotely if I had to.

Backup – well the client PC backup is part of the WSSe environment – as such it’s a single instance storage of all the client PCs (up to 25) in your network.  It automatically will backup the PCs if they are in the network and turned on during the backup window.  Clients can restore individual folders or the entire PC if required.  To restore an entire PC is pretty darn simple – the user can easily be guided through creating a recovery USB stick via the WD DX 4000 console and then they can boot their PC off that USB and restore their machine from the most recent backup.  Very cool.  Oh – and should a backup fail for a machine, it will be displayed on the front LCD panel of the DX 4000.

Server Backup – Although WSSe includes a backup utility by default, Western Digital have elected to disable this due to inherent limitations in its design from Microsoft (basically it can’t backup more than 2TB).  What this means is that you need to look at alternate options to backup any data you have on your WD Sentinel.  Western Digital are working on some options for this now and will announce more in future.  For me however, I’m using BackupAssist to backup my DX 4000 to an external Western Digital 3TB MyBook drive.  I’ll do a separate blog post on that tomorrow to show you how BackupAssist get around the 2TB limit. 

File Storage – I’m using my unit for production data and have it integrated into my SBS domain.  I’ve configured (using the WD Sentinel console) a number of shares and have copied over data from other servers in my network to centralise all my data storage on this device.  Access to the data is controlled via a group I’ve created on my SBS server and this is the easiest way to do this.  Once I’ve added members into the group permitted access to this server, I can then use the WD Sentinels console to further refine who in that group can access which shares on the sever.

Remote access – the WD Sentinel also has the inbuilt Remote Web Access application that is resident in SBS 2011 Essentials, and Windows Home Server 2011 Premium.  This isn’t needed in my particular use, but would be very useful in small offices that don’t have any other servers.  The Remote Web Access allows users to remotely access files and folders on this server using nothing more than an Internet Explorer web browser.

Media Streaming – is also another feature of this device where you can upload photos, music and other videos onto it and it will allow them to be displayed on iPads, PCs, or even your DLNA compliant TV.  In a business sense, I can see this being used for training videos and the like being shared across the network to users that need access on demand to them.

Overall, I’m very impressed with the Western Digital Sentinel DX 4000 unit.  It’s a very good implementation of Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials and I can see that there’s been a lot of thought given to redundancy of the device in many areas.  We’ve had a great deal of interest in this unit from our client base already and I think it will only continue to expand.  If you are in need of a small office server like this, I’d certainly recommend looking at it as a solution for your business needs.

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