Windows Home Server is just one of the many operating system products that Microsoft has been working on for the past few years and now they have released a public beta to try out before it makes its retail release this fall. It is meant to be installed on an old PC and is designed to run "headless" (without a mouse, keyboard, or monitor). It is basically a home server that automatically backs up your home networks' computers and allows you to store your digital media and files on the server to access them from a centralized location on your network.
Windows Home Server (WHS) is actually built off of Windows Server 2003's codebase, so you know that it's a really solid operating system and has lots of administrative features for networks. What Microsoft has done is made it so you don't have to ever touch the server computer after you install the OS because you administer the server from the Windows Home Server Client Console from a client PC connected to the network. From there you do everything from create user accounts, manage the servers's storage, and use WHS add-ins. The console's interface is really sleek and easy to use.
The login screen from a client computer to log into the WHS Client Connector.
The WHS Client Connector, which allows you to remotely manage every aspect of the server.
When you connect external USB or Firewire hard drives to the server, it will automatically format the drive and balance the server's data across all the drives. This way instead of having drive shares on the client computers, which is the conventional way of sharing files on a network, WHS creates what it terms as a storage pool of avilable storage space that it uses to store all of your network's shared files. You no longer have to deal with mapping network drives in My Computer either because it creates a "Shared Folders" icon on your desktop which gives you one-touch access to the shared folders on the server. WHS supports any amount of storage space big or small. We recommend anywhere from 200GB to 500GB for a normal home network with 2-5 computers. If you never want to add storage to the server, you simply plug it in and WHS does the rest automatically.
The WHS Client Connector's storage tab which allows you to see and manage your server's hard drive space and devices. In our configuration, we have a 160GB internal hard drive and a 250GB external USB drive.
When your create users on WHS, it sets up a personal folder for that user where they can store anything they want on the server, which it will be spanned across multiple drives (if you have multiple drives installed) to prevent data loss should one of the server's drives fail. One thing we wanted to mention about the user accounts is that you want to make them the same user name and password as the account you sign into on your client PC because if you don't, you'll have to input your user name and password everytime you want to access a shared folder.
WHS automatically backs up your computers on the network at a preset time that you set. You can also exclude computers from being backed up as well as specific folders and file types from a computer's individual backup. The first backup will take awhile because it backs up everything, but on each subsenquent backup, it doesn't take nearly as long because it only backs up the files that have either been added or changed since the last backup. Another awesome feature about WHS is that each backup doesn't take up the same hard drive space as the files that it backed up on the client computer because of how it stores each backup. In our tests, a 60GB backup only took up about 16GB on the server.
WHS also monitors the health of the network's computers and devices. If a computer connected to the network doesn't have an anti-virus program installed or doesn't have the latest Windows Updates, it alerts you about it from any computer logged into the server.
The WHS Home Network Health monitor keeps tabs on your network's computers without having to be logged it at each computer.
Perhaps our favorite part of WHS is the add-ins that the online community of developers and coders develop. Most of them are available for free and can add some really neat functionality to WHS. Our favorite add-in is the WHS Program Launcher written by Dan Forsyth and is available for free from his site. It allows you to remotely connect to WHS and use it like you would your regular PC so you don't have to connect it to a mouse, keyboard, and monitor if you want to do something beyond the scope of the Windows Home Server Client Connector. You can also call up the task manager from his add-in along with other really great features. A really good place to find out about more add-ins and where to download them is the Microsoft Windows Home Server community forums.
Another really awesome feature is the remote access ability that comes built-in to WHS. From any browser from anywhere, you can remotely connect to your server and access your files shares and even remotely connect to your individual network PCs as long as your PC's operating system supports it. Microsoft even provides you with a subdomain of your choice at https://xxxxx.homeserver.com to remotely connect to your server using your user name and password. (Microsoft requires you to have a Windows Live ID, which are free, to sign up for the free domain.)
Microsoft has said that it has formed partnerships with several hardware vendors, such as HP and Iomega, to build desktop computers that are specifically designed to run WHS. These units are scheduled to be available in the fall, when WHS ships.
We have recently heard from various Web sources that Microsoft may ship WHS around August 15th with a retail price of between $200-$300. It will be sold as an OEM product as well as being pre-installed on desktop PCs built by WHS's hardware partners. However, we feel that $200-$300 is a little expensive for the home user and it should be sold OEM for around $150.
Regardless of price, we feel that Windows Home Server is really an excellent product and really is an advancement in home server products. It's full of really useful features and makes it easy to administer and run. Performance is outstanding and we really didn't find any bugs despite being a pre-release product. As we mentioned before, you really don't need an overly powerful computer to run WHS. We ran our installation on a Dell desktop computer from 2002 with an Intel Pentium 4 1.60 GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM and it ran completely perfect.
WHS Client Console comes with tons of settings that allow you to have complete control over your server.
