The removal of the Drive Extender in Windows Home Server “Vail” has caused quite a stir up. But, given the right resources, anything is possible. A Microsoft MVP sent an email to his lead that ultimately got forwarded to Steve Ballmer himself. His reply: “Let’s look into it.”. That’s it. Short and sweet. I’d like to see how he resolves this. With his track record, I’m sure that the Drive Extender functionality will be included in Vail.

Windows Home Server hasn’t exactly taken the consumer market by storm, showing yet again that people are more interested in shiny new toys than protecting their precious data. Still, there’s been a huge amount of negative backlash from Microsoft’s recent decision to drop Drive Extender from the next release of WHS, currently codenamed Vail. Drive Extender is the tech that enables multiple physical disks to act as a single logical volume, making it easy for even non-techy folks to add more and enable data replication.