Unless you have been living under a stone it is probable that you know that Windows Home Server is coming to a shop near you very soon.  Home Server is priced very keenly and offers a number of great facilities, but also has some restrictions on it.  So, what does Home Server do:

• Centralised Unlimited Storage
• Sharing via folders, a web site that can be accesses from any internet connection, with PCs, game consoles and more
• Protection against failure of your connect PCs, your precious data (photos etc) any disk including the system disk in the home server and against unpatched PCs
• A platform for add-ins

That is it - it is a great file and media home server that has amazing remote access and backup capability.  It is still a Windows Server, built by the same team that deliver SBS, but it has some restrictions:

• It is not designed to be a Domain Controller
• It is often sold by OEMs as a headless (no monitor or keyboard to set it up) device with no requirement to ever use a keyboard or mouse
• Some server software might not run on it and obviously some desktop software will also refuse to load and run
• The system disk will be 20GB when installed and the remaining storage will be the D drive.  The D drive is where files get copied too before being distribute to other disks if that is going to happen, so the bigger the better.
• You must use wired connection to the network hub
• Don't bother with raid configuration - Windows Home Server will provide all the disk protection you need (assuming you mark the shares you want to protect again disk failure) as well as enabling a system disk replacement without loosing files.

Installation

I thought I would walk you through the installation process of an OEM system.

1. Turn on Windows Home Server and plug into your network (well, perhaps plug it in to the network and turn the box on).
2. Go to a PC that you want to connect to Windows Home Server, load the client utils.
3. Configure via the wizards the machine name, domain name you want your server to respond to for remote access and the users at home.
4. Configure if you want extra protection on any of the file shares and any files in those shares will automatically be duplicated to two disks in the system.
5. Configure which users have read, write or no access to each share. By default everyone has full access to the pre-defined Photos, Videos and Music share and since a share is created for each user, the user has full access and everyone else has no access to those shares by default

I think you will now be a good 3 minutes into the process now and you are done.

If you don't have an OEM machine and you are loading on hardware yourself then the process obviously starts with building the machine (min 512MB of RAM and almost any processor that has been made in the last few years - CPU demand is low, as is memory, however some of the OEM chassis make building your own a pretty mute point - it may just be worth buying one from someone:

1. Insert DVD and boot machine
2. Follow the simple installation wizard (if you want to eval for 30-days, leave the PID entry blank)
3. Watch it build (or go have a coffee, smoke, chat etc)
4. Follow the above steps to configure

Features

Unlimited Storage

The unlimited storage is provided by virtue of the fact that when you put another disk in the system you are offered via the client PC tools to simply press the "add storage" button and the disk gets subsumed into the Windows Home Server storage pool.  All the shares then get the added space - you don't have to add drive letters, extend drives, format disks or do anything else.  Simply plug in an extra internal or external disk and you are good to go in about 2 minutes and that includes disk formatting.

There is just one limit to be aware of which is the D drive.  When you copy files to a Windows Home Server they will in reality be stored on the D drive 1st, which means that if it is not large enough your file copy will fail, even if you have tons of storage spread over other drives.  Also remember that your total storage is the combination of the D drive and any other disks you have added to the pool, but if you copy a 1MB file to a share marked for duplication then 2MB will be used - one for each copy.

To take this further, if you have marked files for duplication, but store more files than the size of your combined size of you disk after disk 1, then you may find copies fail there as they are unable to duplicate.  This might sound a little complex, so lets try a little picture:

   The maximum amount of data that can be duplicated in the picture is 50GB (as 50GB can be stored on the D drive and 50GB on the 2nd Disk).  Further non-duplicated files (350GB) can be stored on the 2nd disk, but in the event that the 2nd disk fails, the non-duplicated files would be lost.  If you lost the system disk then all the files on the 2nd Disk would be available once you replace the system disk.

Sharing

Sharing with Windows Home Server is a multi-faceted thing.  First off we have traditional file shares (\\myhomeserver\photos) which have all their permissions controlled by a simple wizard screen.  We then have the web site - when you configure Windows Home Server you can have a domain created and constantly connected to your PC (even if you don't have a static IP address).  You get to choose the name, but it will be something like http://yourname.homeserver.com. PCs can scan the media and files stored on the shares as well as Windows Media Connector devices, Xbox 360s and even MACs (although to connect a MAC you need to disable some of the server security protocols).  Through a simple wizard you control access and the passwords for the clients are automatically synchronised between the client and the server, so change it on the client and the access to the server is updated.

Protect

Protections comes in many forms, but Windows Home Server helps protect your desktop PCs as well as the information on the Server.  I have already talked about the disk duplication to protect files on the server against a disk failure, so lets look at what else it can do for the PCs around the home.  The Home Server client that is installed on each PC enables a full backup to be made to the server of the PC.  Full backup allows you to get a client PC, replace the PC or disk, boot from the Home Server recovery disk and have the full system restored to that PC.  Simple and safe.

The same backup can then be accessed through the console to get your files back online.  This means you get the benefit of incremental backups over time (as you can view the backups over time) as well as a full system backup that can be remotely restored.  This process means that you can even "turn back the clock", a bit like system restore to move your PC back to a point in time.

Finally Windows Home Server also “monitors” the health of each of your computers, letting you know the exact condition of every one. It alerts you to needed updates, ensuring that you’ll always have up-to-date virus and other critical protections in place.

More Information

If you want to know more about Windows Home Server, have a look at http://www.microsoft.com/windowshomeserver or the Official Home Server blog at http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver.  OEMs are producing systems which you will have to look out for, but I can point you to a whole bunch of add-ins for Windows Home Server at http://www.wegotserved.co.uk/windows-home-server-add-ins/

OK, that is it for now on Windows Home Server.  I will publish some hints and tips later.

ttfn

David