Date: March 20, 2007 - Author:
We have a look at the beta version of the Home Server software, which you’ll be able to purchase separately or as part of a Home Server bundle from PC makers like HP. With its combination of features and simplicity, this is one future home networking product that’s worth looking forward to.
Windows Home Server is a product from Microsoft, introduced at CES this past January, scheduled to be released around the holiday season of 2007. WHS is designed to be a “headless” network appliance, meaning there will be no monitor, mouse, and keyboard attached to the system.
Microsoft has two distribution models for the product.
For most of the public sector, the first model is likely to be the method for obtaining a Windows Home Server. These complete hardware/software solutions will come pre-built from manufacturers, usually in small, aesthetically pleasing cases. WHS will be preinstalled and configured on these machines by the manufacturer; all the consumer has to do is install the client on their home computers. The second model is for PC enthusiasts that prefer to “roll their own,” so to speak.
Essentially, Windows Home Server is designed to be a central repository for all of your household’s important data and media files. Currently Windows Home Server is in the closed beta stages, and for the purposes of this preview I will be working from WHS Beta 2. That being said, the features I talk about in this article are still subject to change in the final RTM version.
Without further ado, let’s take an in-depth look at what the future may hold for the home networking enthusiasts out there.
Windows Home Server has fairly modest minimum hardware requirements.
I decided to test the Windows Home Server using close to the minimum system requirements. As I said before, Microsoft plans to release this in a standalone software form that can be purchased by enthusiasts -- if you have some low-end or old hardware lying around, it might be a good candidate for WHS. I have a fairly modest Dell Dimension B110 (I had been using for a Windows 2003 Server) that I thought would be a good candidate for this project.
If you system supports booting from a USB device, you can install Windows Home Server using a USB DVD drive. After the installation there isn’t much need for the DVD drive in the system anymore.
If you don’t have a system available but want to use WHS, the hardware requirements aren’t strenuous, and a basic desktop machine can fit the bill. I configured a Dell Dimension E520, with a 2.8GHz Celeron, 160GB HD and 512MB of RAM at dell for around $480. If you’d rather build your own server, I was able to configure a system with an AMD Sempron 3400+ (1.8GHz; Socket AM2) with a 250GB SATAII HD and 512MB RAM for $310 after shipping. As you can see, a home server can be done fairly well on the cheap if you don’t already have an older system around. Because WHS is still in the Beta stage, I was unable to get prices for custom built systems from OEMs like Dell and HP.
The installation process for Windows Home Server is fairly simple. I did have a small hiccup with the first installation attempt. Dell has a setting in the BIOS called OS Installation Mode, which limits the available memory to 256MB. I received an error message stating that I did not meet the minimum system requirements for installation. If you’re configuring WHS on a Dell machine, be on the lookout for this as a potential hang-up, but the fix is a simple change to your BIOS settings.
If you’ve ever installed Windows XP, the Windows Home Server installer will look very familiar, though it is really more of a hybrid of the XP and Vista installers. The OS hard drive selection is done via a Windows style GUI similar to the Vista installer instead of the blue and gray text screens of the XP Installer. You select which drive you want to install on -- in my case, there is only the single 80GB drive installed in my system. Then you are presented with a message stating that all information on the drive will be erased, and “Are you really sure you want to do this?” The remainder of the installation was very similar to installing Windows XP. If you’ve ever installed Windows, or even software on Windows, then you can install Windows Home Server. There’s no rocket-science here.
I did run into a minor problem: while trying to name the server, WHS told me that any name I entered was already a server on my network. Again, since this is beta software, I expected there to be a few bugs. Working around this issue required some clever trickery. I entered the number 1 as the server name, and it accepted that. Later in the install process, WHS told me that my server name was an invalid format, and at that point I was able to enter my desired server name, along with the administrator password. After checking the bug reports, I found that if you remove the network cable it will accept any name you put in. My solution was also already listed as an option as well.
After stepping through the wizard screens, which consisted basically of selecting a server name, selecting the install drive, and entering an administrator password, you can go grab a drink, use the bathroom or whatever -- because you can expect WHS to take about 20 minutes to install. The install process restarts the computer several times (pretty much after every step of the install process), downloads any updates to the system and eventually dumps you at a desktop with a Finish button. At the next login it asks you to change your password. I have a feeling that had I not run into the server naming issue there would have been a blank password that I would be asked to change.
My graphics drivers weren’t installed automatically, but I expected this. WHS is based off of Windows Server 2003, and Server 2003 never automatically installs the graphics on this particular machine. A quick stop by the Dell support site fixed this and I was ready to go.
I’m a power user; I like to set up my own partitions, and keep things on my Hard Drive nice and orderly. That said, I was a bit skittish about what WHS had done to my hard drive through all of this set up process. Here are the resulting drive configurations.
Strangely enough, it used a partition scheme nearly identical to what I had already put on the drive. Under my Server 2003 install, I had a 9GB partition for my system drive and a 65GB partition for my Data Storage drive. I was quite pleasantly surprised as I rarely agree with anybody’s default configurations.
I wasn’t expecting much of a desktop, if any at all, to be available from a user standpoint. When I originally heard about WHS it was described as a “headless” box for content storage. From what I can tell though, it has a fully functioning desktop environment, all the way down to an installation of Outlook Express and Windows Desktop Search. I checked, and it seems that it’s also possible to join it to a Windows Domain if so desired. In fact, as WHS stands right now, it can be a domain controller. I verified this rumor myself by running dcpromo from a command prompt.
As WHS is designed for home use, it wouldn’t be terribly effective to run this as a Domain Controller, as XP and Vista Home editions do not support joining a domain. The additional overhead of running Active Directory would cause a significant performance hit to the server. It will be interesting to see if this makes it into the final version.
From what I can tell if you wanted to use WHS as the OS for a permanently connected computer in your home, there is no reason why you couldn’t install it on a existing desktop computer. It only uses about 4GB of the allotted 10GB system partition it creates during install, allowing for plenty of room to install a few other programs, such as MS Office. I would do this with caution though; the message below appears when you log in as administrator on WHS.
On my Windows 2003 Server I ran Cobain Backup 8. I used the program to do backups via FTP to my webspace. I have a ridiculous amount of storage and bandwidth through them and they are located several states away, so it’s a wonderful solution for offsite backup. I’m quite happy to see that I still have the option to install this on WHS -- I can move all of those local backups done through WHS offsite once a week.
There is very little actual configuration to be done for WHS. It creates several default shares during the installation. Everything on the server side is done during the installation process. Remote Desktop Connection is enabled during the installation, so you can stick the thing in a closet or under a bed somewhere – after completing the setup process, you’ve done everything that requires physical access to the machine.
According to the documentation from Microsoft, the next step in the process is to install the WHS Connector software on a normal machine. As I said before, WHS is really designed to be a “headless” storage solution. Essentially, it’s a NAS Device with a brain. I proceeded to install the WHS Connector on my Windows Vista Home Premium machine with no complications.
The WHS Connector is where all of the configuration and maintenance for WHS will be done. The Connector is identical to the Home Server Console that was available when sitting at the desktop on the server. The connector requires you to enter the Windows Home Server password, though they are a little unclear as to what this is. I just took a guess at it being the Administrator password determined during the server setup, and it turned out I was correct. After logging in I was presented with the Console screen.
From here I began configuring the server. In the upper right hand corner of the console I found the WHS Settings button. Here I was able to configure the region language, time zone, and Windows Update settings. The server can also be shutdown or restarted from here. I was also able to configure the General Backup settings for the automated backups, and change the WHS Password from the User Accounts Tab.
I decided the next thing to do was add a user. It was fairly straightforward. Click on User Accounts in WHS Connector, then click Add. In typical Windows style, I was presented with a wizard to step me through adding a user.
This process also creates a folder for the user in the “Users” shared folder on the server.
One feature of WHS is the ability to easily add media to the media pool on the server. To do this I just had to plug in another hard drive. This can be a USB, IDE, SATA, or SCSI hard drive. If it’s a hard drive, and it is still usable, it will probably work in WHS. I chose to add an additional 80GB internal hard drive. Once connected, the drive appears in the Server Storage tab on WHS.
Clicking the Add button will launch the Add a Hard Drive wizard. The wizard will format the hard Drive and add it to the media pool.
As you can see below, my Total Size has gone from 74GB to 149GB. Not a ton of storage, but plenty for storing most of the media that I have and some nightly backups from my computers. Once a second drive is installed, WHS allows for Share Duplication across drives. This option will make a copy of the shared folder on both drives for redundancy protection.
Depending on how much of your media pool is in use, removing a hard drive might be a bit trickier than installing a hard drive. If you do not have enough free space to compensate for the drive you are removing you will have to delete some files before removing the drive. The process is very similar to adding a hard drive; just click the Remove button.
Microsoft is making a valiant effort at getting home users to start doing regular backups of their files. Windows Home Server is designed to perform automated nightly backups of the computers on the home network. Configuring backups of an entire computer is quite simple. Right-click on a computer in WHS Connector and select configure backup. Again, I head off to wizard land, should I really expect different from Microsoft. At this point the program is really just designed to back up entire drives. There is the ability to exclude folders, but I got an error message stating the “Home PC is Unresponsive” every time I tried to exclude a folder.
After having run the nightly backups for a week; it appears that the backups are incremental. So it only backs up a file if it is new, or it has changed. This is probably the best method for home users. Home Server is also smart enough to only keep one copy of a file. So if you have the same music library on two computers, WHS will only make one copy of the file. This can significantly reduce the amount of storage required for backups. WHS does automatic backup clean-up also. It allows you to set how many backups to keep on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis. I set mine to keep the first back up of every month, the first backup of every week, and backups for the last 3 days. If you’re not making a ton of file changes on the system every day then backup storage won’t get terribly large.
I hope to see them add some more functionality to this in future releases and the final RTM. I would like to see an “advanced” mode where I can select individual folders to backup. Looking at the Requests Forum for this product, several other beta testers have requested this as well.
After running a manual backup I wanted to check how easy it would be to restore a file. The process is a bit buried. I had to click on View Backups, select my backup file, and then open the backup. It would be nice to have a Restore Files button next to the Backup Now button. The first time I opened a backup WHS actually asked me to install a driver during the process. The driver was unsigned, which means this won’t work on a 64-bit version of Windows right now. I would assume that Microsoft will sign the driver in the final release of the product. After installing the driver, a new window opens that shows all of the files in the backup. It looks just like a normal explorer window, which I could drag and drop from. I don’t see any kind of restore button though. This restore is really only designed for restoring data files. To restore critical system files one would need to use the WHS Home Computer Restore CD.
The only major issue I have run into with WHS was the Home Computer Restore CD. Apparently, Microsoft has no love for the nForce 4 network controller. I received an “unknown network” error when trying to restore my system from the backup CD. At least it still looked really pretty, though. The Home Computer Restore CD uses the new Windows Vista based version of WinPE.
I was able to configure Windows Media Sharing similar to that in Windows Media Player 11. The Windows Media Sharing allows for other computers and Xbox360s to play audio and video files stored on the server, across the network. Windows Media Libraries show in Network Places. In this case, the media libraries from my computer and from the Windows Home Server are available to view. Double-clicking on the server’s library opens it in Windows Media Player.
WHS allows you to synchronize the passwords for your local account and your account on the server. You can select whether you want to keep the password from the local computer or from the server.
Remote access can be accomplished by several different methods in WHS. Windows Remote Desktop Connection is always an option. There is also a fully featured web interface available. Through this interface I was able to upload and download files, and create new folders. Microsoft is even offering yourname.homeserver.com addresses for those that don’t have their own domain, though this feature doesn’t seem to be available yet.
Windows home server looks to have quite a bit of promise. The beta version is still a bit buggy, but I’ve come to expect that from beta software these days. Overall, where features are concerned I think they’ve covered the bases well for the average home users.
I’m glad to see that Microsoft is making a solid effort at getting home users to start backing up their files. That is something that is lacking on every OS front, not just Windows. Because they are marketing a version of this toward the enthusiast market, I would like to see them add the option for some more advanced backup features. Specifically, I would like to see the option to select folders for backup on an individual basis, as opposed to an entire drive. I was however impressed to see that WHS only keeps one backup copy of a file that is on several of the network computers.
I didn’t write a section on Home Network Health Monitoring because essentially all this does is check the Windows Security Center settings for all of your computers. Because I turn my Windows Firewall off, my network health always shows as critical. I would like to see the ability to change how the health monitor reports; similar to the reporting in Windows Security Center.
My only other complaint is the lack of driver support on the Home Computer Restore CD. This has always been a problem with WinPE based discs. Microsoft really needs to add nForce network drivers to this build though. It is a very common network interface and does not increase the build size greatly.
So far, the product seems to be a very capable solution for home users who wish to have network storage that can easily increase capacity as necessary. It’s also a great way to give new life to old hardware. Keep an eye out for more information on this product towards the 2007 holiday season.
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