Review - Windows Home Server (WHS)

[Steadyhands]

I've recently set up a Windows Home Server (WHS). Based on Small Business Server 2003 (still has some of the SBS badging during install) it is targeted at the family that have several computers in the house and want a simple file share and backup functionality. A single WHS system allows you to connect 10 home PC's to it and is currently retailing for AU$225.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro.../features.mspx

I've been starting to outgrow my storage solution. My primary machine is my laptop and I have been keeping the images that no longer fit on the laptop on a series of external HD's, one of which is stored off site. My storage needs have been growing at by about 30% a year. I've been thinking about how best to solve the space issue, I was thinking about upgrading one of the family computers in the house or buying a NAS. A friend put me onto a newly released Microsoft product called Windows Home Server (WHS).

Install
On my brand new box it took about an hour to install. You then have to install the Console app onto each of the home PC's, this only takes a few minutes. In about a hour and a half I was up and running.

Backup
Automated nightly backups to the server from all PC's connected to it. These start at a time of your choosing (default 12pm) and image your PC to the server. Incremental changes are then saved on subsequent nights. You then choose to how long to keep the daily, weekly & monthly backups. It does a cleanup every Sunday and removes any older backups or ones you've flagged for deletion. I haven't had to test this out and hope I don't, but from my research on the web it's a simple process. You can restore a complete image or individual files and folders. It's smart enought to recognise that the OS and other files on multiple PC's don't need to be backed up individually so this saves a lot of space.

PC Recovery
This is very simple from the backup and a supplied recovery CD. The recovery CD is also stored on the server as a ISO so you can burn a copy. You could loose a HD in a machine, install a new one and then recover from your last backup without having to reinstall all of your apps. Obviously you miss out on any speed advantages you'd get from a clean install but it's quick and easy. You can even upgrade HD this way, ever wanted to replace a HD but didn't want to go through the pain of re-installing all your programs?

Drive Extender
This is a very cool part of WHS. WHS reserves 20Gb of the Primary partition for the OS, the remainder of this drive and all other drives become part of a pool. To all machines on the network the server appears to only have one drive. You can plug in a new 500Gb HD, go to the admin console tell the server that the new drive is to be part of the pool and you now have 500Gb more storage. The server will then try to Balance the load on the drives in such a way that the Primary partition is used as little as possible. This Primary partition is called a landing zone and is the area where you copy your files to. This is quite a complicated area and is fully explained in the Technical Brief at the bottom of the page.

Duplication
One of the first things I did after switching on the server was to copy my photos to it. If you have two or more hard drives on your home server, WHS ensures files stored in shared folders are automatically duplicated to multiple hard drives. In my two 500Gb HD WHS system I have copies of the images on both HD's, but to the other networked PC's they appear only one. The thing I like about this is the are not encrypted in any way, I can remove the 2nd HD and plug it into another machine and all the files are there.

File Sharing
Share areas are created for the users you add on the server. I have my music on the server and this is shared to my son's XBox, which is in turn connected to the Home Theatre. The achieved digital photos are stored on the share area of the server and my Image Management DB IMatch has been repointed to look for them there. For now I've copied my IMatch DB and are running it as a test version. In this version I've re-mapped all of my normally offline to the share area on the server. Access time for jpgs is good over wireless to the laptop. Raws are a little slower. I wouldn't store the IMatch DB on the server until the Power Pack1 is released due to the Data bug (see below). The Power Pack was also to have an easy method to back up the WHS machine itself to external HD's but this may have been pulled from this release. Currently I have a external HD that is my off site backup so this will slot in nicely to my workflow.

Remote Access
An area that I haven't explored is remote access. WHS can be configured to allow remote access via the net. Your files on the share would be available to you from anywhere in the world with a internet connection. You can also manage the WHS and connected PC's via a ActiveX control in IE7. I have been using Remote Desktop to get into the server also but for most things I can simply use the Console on my laptop to look at the server.

Webserver
Another area that I haven't explored yet. A basic Webserver is built in also. You can setup <domain>.homeserver.com in a couple of clicks. I have hosting elsewhere so this is not something I'm likely to setup.

Addins
There are a growing number of addins available for WHS. There is one that will automatically upload photos in a given folder to your Flickr account. Drop a new file into this folder and it loads to Flickr. Another adds missing mail server functionality. Others extend the Media sharing functions such as TiVO, or add Torrent functions to the console. The We Got Served link at the bottom of the page is the place to go for these.

Pros
Ease of setup
Ease of backup & restore
Adding extra storage is a breeze

Cons
Data corruption bug (fixed in the Power Pack1, in beta testing now) Knowledge Base article. When certain programs are used to edit or transfer files that are stored on a Windows Home Server-based computer that has more than one hard drive, the files may become corrupted. Microsoft is aware of only a very small percentage of users who have confirmed instances of this issue and believes that most users are unlikely to be affected. Microsoft has established that this issue may occur when one of the following programs is used to edit, transfer, and save files to the home server.

This is a biggie and is likely to scare people away, from my research it's possible to work around this issue until the Power Pack1 is released.

Conclusion
I'm very impressed by the ease of use and features. It suits my current needs and has the ability to grow as my needs grow. You don't have to be totally into computers to set one up so this is likely to work in WHS's favour. I don't see it magically taking off and selling many millions of copies but I do think it will slowly gather a large following.


Further Reading
We Got Served An excellent resource for WHS information.

Microsoft Technical Briefs
These are well worth the read to get an insite into the technology behind WHS. The drive extender
Remote Access
Media Sharing
Drive Extender
Home Computer Backup
Home Networking

[ricktas]

Great review Greg and certainly sounds like a great option for those with several PC's in the household.

[I @ M]

An excellent review Greg, from a photography point of view it shows up where we have come from and where we are headed.

Not so very long ago a photographer had to understand composition, colour and exposure and how to focus a lens on a camera manually. After that they took their film to a laboratory for development, from that point on depending on level of seriousness they had to worry about storage in terms of protecting the precious negative from the elements, house fires and theft.

These days photographers such as the members of this site are increasingly having to master all the aforementioned skills and learn many many new ones in relation to processing, printing and as your post so very succinctly points out, the ability to run a computer to a level where they can protect their images.

Did the digital age make it easier all round to produce quality photos? -------

[pgbphotographytas]

Thats a great review, if I had a few more computer at home I would look at setting it up.

Paul

[ricktas]

Originally Posted by I @ M

Did the digital age make it easier all round to produce quality photos? -------

Not sure, but it certainly made it cheaper to delete the bad ones.

[brindyman]

very good roundup dude well done

dont remember folks you dont have to fork out for a windows small business server or home server when you have a linux server the linux community is very strong and considering that over 75% of all the servers in the world are running linux its not hard to see why

[MBPhoto]

Thanks for the info Greg. Looks like a promising setup for users of multiple Windows OS systems at home (my house for one). One question I would have, which would be a huge consideration before installing this software is can you run other software on the server, such as burning software. I have only 1 desktop and a few laptops that run together. I share external HDD that are attached to the desktop, but this type of setup would be better IMO noting the backup facilities etc. Without the ability to run some other software on it, I dont think that I could switch to it yet.

From your testing, are you aware if it is possible to install applications on the server?

Any help is appreciated.

[Steadyhands]

Thanks for the comments guys.

@Mark, I pretty sure you can run additional software on it, it's just a W32 system at it's core. I've got a anti-virus system on it and will be installing special defrag software soon, but other than that my system is original. Your external HD could be part of the storage pool if you wanted it to be.

[Ploddy]

Awesome review, thanks.

I really think this is the solution to my backup and storage issues. I have been waiting for this bug to be fixed, and as soon as it is, I'll be using it.

Interesting to note the fix was due in June 08 - hopefully its not too far away.

[dh52726]

excellent review and since i;m considering a home server this is extreemely help full!

One thing that i did not notice being covered was what happens if a Hdd were to fail on the server? Are the hdds raided in some way? how much reduncy do you have, and does it support hot swap/spare?

at the moment i was going to setup a linux mdadm raid 5 and have various apps to backup individual machines, but would prefer a windows alternative.

[Steadyhands]

Originally Posted by Ploddy

Awesome review, thanks.

I really think this is the solution to my backup and storage issues. I have been waiting for this bug to be fixed, and as soon as it is, I'll be using it.

Interesting to note the fix was due in June 08 - hopefully its not too far away.

No probs, glad to help out.

The bug fix is in Beta and can be downloaded any time - it solves the problems and adds some much asked for features also. Personally I'm waiting for the official release.

Originally Posted by dh52726

excellent review and since i;m considering a home server this is extreemely help full!

One thing that i did not notice being covered was what happens if a Hdd were to fail on the server? Are the hdds raided in some way? how much reduncy do you have, and does it support hot swap/spare?

at the moment i was going to setup a linux mdadm raid 5 and have various apps to backup individual machines, but would prefer a windows alternative.

The HD's are not in any form of RAID and the instruction specifically say NOT to install it on a RAID system. The share areas on the server can be setup (tick and flick) to be duplicated. If you system has two HD's then it copies the data onto each. If you secondary HD fails you plug in a new one (not sure about hot swapping - I haven't checked it out) and it will then add it to the pool and balance the data again form the copy on the Primary drive.

For a fail on the Primary Drive, your shares are still on the secondary and can be rebuilt from there I think. You are best to read the Drive Extender white paper above, it explains the concepts behind the duplication and repair better than I can.

The one thing that isn't duplicated is the PC backups. The power pack was to have a feature to enable you to backup the whole server to an external HD, but this was removed I think. It'll be available later I hear. This can still be done, but you'd have to do it manually and the We Got Servered forums have a good amount of data on this.

[dh52726]

ok so lets say i need 1tb of backed up data. i have 500gb hdds, does that mean i need 4x500 to get both the primary and secondary pools?

for my use i want to back up 3 machines, plus have a server side data store, this data is not duplicated on any other machine. so thats why i want to go with sumthing with raid support.

i'll check out the white paper, but on the face of thing it does not look like windows has something like this covered at the moment.

[MBPhoto]

Originally Posted by Steadyhands

Thanks for the comments guys.

@Mark, I pretty sure you can run additional software on it, it's just a W32 system at it's core. I've got a anti-virus system on it and will be installing special defrag software soon, but other than that my system is original. Your external HD could be part of the storage pool if you wanted it to be.

Thanks so much for the info. For a free trial I think I might order it and check it out. I have all the software to re-install Vista OS and the burning software I need if it doesn't suit needs so there is nothing to lose really.

I have 3 external HDD which I understand would all be placed in pool for the server to use as required. Great kit and about time that Microsoft started to look at affordable solutions for small network servers.

[brindyman]

Personally i wouldnt create a server without having the drives raided for the fact that if one of my drives was to fail i could just take it out and put in a new one.

One of the Benefits of the new SATA drives is that they are hotswappable this means that when one dies you just take it out put the new one in and it starts to build the array without even having to turn the server off.

Their are Different Raid Arrays that you can Use The main ones are:

Raid 0 - this basically just combines a certain amount of physical drives to make it appear as one hard drive.

RAID 1 (mirrored disks) uses two (possibly more) disks which each store the same data, so that data is not lost so long as one disk survives. Total capacity of the array is just the capacity of a single disk. The failure of one drive, in the event of a hardware or software malfunction, does not increase the chance of a failure or decrease the reliability of the remaining drives (second, third, etc).

RAID 5 (striped disks with parity) combines three or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of any one disk; the storage capacity of the array is reduced by one disk. The less common RAID 6 can recover from the loss of two disks.

Hope that helps you understand how useful and potentially vital it is when coming to backing up your pictures on a server.

[dh52726]

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

Power pack 1 official release.

thouhg for me i think i'll go with linux for now

[brindyman]

Originally Posted by dh52726

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

Power pack 1 official release.

thouhg for me i think i'll go with linux for now

good man

[auspoundy]

The coolest feature I've found in WHS is the PC restore. You can do a bare-metal restore from a crashed drive over the network - boot from the recovery CD, select a backup point to restore from, and then watch the data come back. Your PC is up and running, with your data and programs as they were. Awesome peace of mind - I'm thinking of putting one in my mum's place so I never have to worry about "fixing" her PC when I visit.

I picked up a HP Mediasmart Server that runs WHS a month ago when I was in the US. It's a pity that at the moment there aren't any of the hardware manufacturers that are shipping to Australia (Tranquil are available from the UK and will ship here but it's expensive) as the "home built" option isn't as neat as the way those hardware guys have made their systems. The other thing with these boxes is they're more meant to be "headless" and really focusing on being great for non-technical families wanting to protect their home PCs/digital memories.

[Steadyhands]

My WHS has now been running happily for 4 months now. I don't have my server running 24/7 though. I usually turn the server on over the weekend when I do most of my shooting ie to backup what I have shot. The fix for the data corruption bug (called Power Pack 1) came out mid year and things are running very well. I never experienced any problems even before PP1 came out. The PP1 added a few extra features also.

I added the 1Tb disk to the system today. Totally painless experience, the hardest part was move the internals aside to fit the new HD into the spare drive bay. Once I powered up the system first the first time after the new drive was installed I loaded the Console app from my Laptop and went to the server storage tab. The new drive had been recognised by the system and it asked me if I wanted to add it to the Pool. After about a minute I had 1Tb of extra space. As you can see in the first screen cap I still have three spare bays to add extra drives.

Here's a couple of screen caps
This is the console app that you run from your PC's
This is a Disk Management Add-in (free) that gives you a different view of your system storage.


The Standard Storage Window, you can see the % of storage space used by Shares, Dup, and PC Backups etc.

[dh52726]

i've been thinking of trying out WHS lately, have got my linux raid 5 setup going but there is no GUI and as this is my first time trying linux there are a lot of commands i have to remember. And the fact there is no auto PC backups, if i forget to run it then the system is not backed up (i currently do this via xcopy scripts)

Lack of raid thought is the only thing thats been puttingme off so far.