Digital Home Thoughts: Microsoft Ignites Customer Fury By Announcing Removal of Drive Extender Technology in Next-Gen 'Vail' Product

"In a shock move, Microsoft today announced that it had abandoned development of Windows Home Server's Drive Extender storage technology. The announcement comes almost eight months into a public beta of the next version of Windows Home Server, codenamed "Vail", and will result in Vail, Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials (Codename "Aurora") and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials (Codename "Breckenridge") shipping without Microsoft's advanced storage subsystem."

In a blog post earlier today, Michael Leworthy from Microsoft's Windows Home Server team dropped a bombshell: the next-generation Windows Home Server software, currently code-named "Vail", will not come with Drive Extender technology. The outage among WHS users has been swift and furious - the first post has racked up more than 130 user comments, and the second blog post - which strangely doesn't explain much of anything - is quickly gaining. As an avid WHS user myself, I find this extremely puzzling. Yes, Drive Extender has some technological limitations and quirks - performance wasn't always great - but the negatives were massively outshone by the positives: the ability to connect any sized hard drive you wanted, and have that hard drive added to the huge pool of storage on your server.

This simple, no-fuss approach is what made the product so incredible. I don't want to have to shell out big bucks for identically sized hard drives all at once to build a RAID array; I want to add bigger hard drives slowly over time when they become less expensive. Vail takes that key advantage away and replaces it with nothing - that's what's most puzzling about this: Microsoft isn't giving any concrete reasons for why it's being removed, and worse, they're not saying what they're going to replace it with. This is an epic failure of communication and leadership on the part of the Windows Home Server Team. I for one will continue to use my HP Windows Home Server for as long as I can because I have no desire to lose the functionality I currently have.