user19597's questions

I'm setting up a fileserver for our department. It'll be connected to the domain.

I want it to have a very large amount of storage (several TB). Ideally, it should also preserve disk space by identifying identical files and only storing them once. It should be fault tollerant so that if one of the drives fails, that drive can be replaced without losing any data. All of these features are available in Microsoft's consumer offering - Windows Home Server. However, I can't find these kind of features within the enterprise Windows Server 2008 R2. Am I missing something?

I know that I could buy a Drobo, or similar, and use this instead. However, I would prefer to use a built-in feature of Windows Server should it exist.

It seems surprising to me that these features should be available in Home Server but not in an enterprise fileserver.

I want to download Windows 7 Enterprise from my MSDN subscription. I can see Win7 Enterprise listed, but it gives me the option to get a key. This isn't what I want - I need a version of the media which will work with a volume licensing key server.

If I download this media, will it magically detect the VL key server and not ask for a product key?