Ever since Microsoft announced they will bedropping their Drive Extender technology from their Windows Home Server product (essentialy killing the product since it's almost its nr.1 feature) I've been on the lookout for a competing product.

I've now stumbled onto Amahi. It looks pretty sweet. Linux based, so stable. The same features as WHS, and it even also has some sort of disk pooling technology called "greyhole" . This greyhole feature is still beta, but it's supposed to already work pretty stable.

Anybody here tried it already? I'm very curious to know what your findings were!

I'm really pissed off about this. I tried one of the early previews of WHS "Vail", and it looked good enough to persuade me to migrate off of a Linux server, what with the drive extender stuff and the ability to back up your other Windows PCs.

Now that they've dropped the drive extender stuff, and completely rejected the possibility of including Windows Media Center functionality, there's just nothing interesting or compelling about the product at all.

I might as well just use straight Windows 2008 R2 server, or stick with the Ubuntu server that I've already got. The "greyhole" stuff looks pretty good for disk extender use -- I'm currently using LVM, which isn't exactly user friendly, and doesn't (?) do duplication. I do backup of the server using rdiff-backup, which works pretty well. Backup of the PCs is by the simple expedient of telling the wife to save her files on the server. "Streaming" is accomplished via SMB to a Windows Media Center PC plugged into the TV.

There is a discussion here about FreeNAS vs WHS Vail.

From quickly skimming through, I get the impression that FreeNAS can use ZFS which allows a similar functionality to WHS Vail's drive extender. Amahi is also mentioned.