MSFN Forum: Windows Home Server 'Vail' Release Candidate (minus Drive Extender) goes to testers

For those Windows Home Server (WHS) loyalists hoping against hope that Microsoft might reconsider its decision to cut Drive Extender from the coming ‘Vail’ release, your prayers have NOT been answered.

Microsoft is delivering the Release Candidate (RC) test build of Vail — Windows Home Server 2011 – on February 3, and there is no Drive Extender included. There’s also no Drive Extender in “Aurora” — Small Business Server 2011 Essentials – a Vail sibling for which Microsoft also is delivering an RC build today. (Aurora is a hybrid cloud-on-premises small-business server, for those who need a refresher.)

In case there is any confusion: Drive Extender is gone. It is not coming back. Period.

Both the Vail and Aurora RCs are public, and available for download as of 10 a.m. PT today via the Microsoft Connect site. Microsoft is calling these the “final, pre-release versions” of both products, with the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) code due in the first half of calendar 2011.

(The WHS team signed off on the RC earlier this week, as the tweet, pictured above — which the team quickly removed — indicated.)

The RC version of the products includes a new wizard for deploying storage and migrating folders. The wizard simplifies the process of detecting storage, formatting a disk, assigning a volume and moving a folder to the new volume, according to Microsoft officials. Microsoft also is making available “Learning Bites for Essentials,” which are 10 five-to-six-minute videos that go through self-service IT tasks available to those using the Small Business Server 2011 Essentials product.

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