What is Windows Home server ?
Before I go deeper into my personal experience with WHS let's take a minute to review what all the buzz is about.
Windows Home server generally provides a simpler, smarter and safer way for families to share, organize and protect their precious photos, videos, music, documents and much more. To know if you would benefit of using WHS for your home you need to ask yourself some questions:
- Do you have 2 or more PC's in your home wich are in a network?
- Do you have a broadband internet connection?
- Do you oftenly spend time backing up those PC's?
- Do you lack access to your files on your computers when you are not at home?
Same as most people these days, you probably answered yes to all of those questions. This means that Windows Home Server would be a great product for you.
You probably have a ton of data and are beginning to have touble keeping track of all of it.
The 4 core features of Windows Home Server:
- Share – With WHS you are able to to access your files from inside and outside of your home. You will be able to connect to your home computers and your server from virtually anywhere and share your files with family and friends through a very user friendly web interface. Also connecting to various devices such as windows mobile devices, smartphones and XBOX 360 is no problem.
- Protect – This is probably Home Server's main function. WHS will do a fully automated backup of your home computers every day. The backups are image based so if a hard drive fails on a home PC you can replace the drive and do a full restore of that machine. An other function is shared foler duplication and snapshots to enable users to restore a file a previous version easily.
- Store – Home server becomes the digital hub for all the data you have stored on your PC's. You can stream music, videos and photos to all PC's that are given access. It also works great with a Windows Media Center PC.
- Expand – With home server you don't have to worry about drive letters and it allows you to expand storage quickly and easily. If you have some old USH or ATA hord drives laying around just plug them in and WHS will add them to the total drive pool. Big points on usability here!
There is a lot of stuff going in the background to make all these great features work. Windows Home Server is based on the trustworthy Windows Server 2003 SP2 with additional services running to give you that home server magic. So what are they and how do they work ?
Automated Backup
This is a new service that takes care of all the daily backups on each PC in the house. If you have a problem on a home PC it allows you to either restore an individual file or an entire PC. So how does this work ?
After setting up your Home server you will need to install the Windows Home Server Connector Software on your home computers. This software will take care of communicating with WHS to arrange the backup process. You can choose what to backup and when. Normally this will be every night.
- When a computer is backed up, a snapshot or Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) is taken of each volume configured for backup. You can choose wich drives are included in each backup.
- The Windows Home Server Connector Software running on your home PC then determines which clusters ( standard 4KB in size) on the volume that have changed since the last backup.
- A hash is then calculated for each changed cluster and is then sent to the Home Server.
- The server then performs a lookup in the central backup database to determine if this cluster is already being stored.
- If the cluster does "not" exist in the backup database, the server then asks the client to send the entire cluster. Otherwise the location of the cluster in this snapshot is recorded and we then move on to the next cluster..and it goes on and on..
- This is repeated until all changed clusters on the PC have been evaluated.
What's really nice about the backup feature is that Home Server uses Single Instance Storage, meaning it will only store a single copy of a given file.
We all know that files get duplicated around on the various home PC's in the house and of course we don't want to backup all these file smultiple times. WHS takes care of this by only backing up each file only once.
Drive Extender
Drive Extender is a fantastic service that handles all the magic behind getting rid of the dreaded drive letters when you are adding additional storage to the Home Server.
This means you can use drives of different sizes both external and internal while the Drive Extender service will just add them to the total drive pool. Also if you remove a drive from the Home Server or one of them fails, WHS will move the data to another drive.
This "redundancy" happens at the shared folder level and you can turn this on or off for individual shares.
With Shared folder duplication what happens is this. Say for example you save a new photo to "Photo" share on your Windows Home Server.
At this point the Drive extender system filter creates a reparse point for the new file and determines onto which disk to store the new file. Within a couple of minutes the drive extender service will create a duplicate copy of the file and update the reparse point with the second location.
Remote Access
This is the coolest feature of Windows Home server. With Home Server you are able to access all your computers both inside and out of your home.
Using the web interface you can log in to acces your shared folders on your Home server, Remote Access the Home Server console and even get a Remote Desktop connection to all the PC's in your home network just like you were sitting in front of your own PC when you are actually far away from home.
Of course to get all of this working prperly requires some configuring. I'll get back at this in the "My Experience" section.
My Experience with Windows Home Server
So now that you are properly introduced to the main functions of WHS and are starting to get an idea what it is exactly, I'll share my experience with it.
My Home server:
I assembled some old computer parts I had lying around and bought some harddisks and come up with this system:
- 3GHz Pentium 4 with silent cooler
- MSI Motherboard
- 1 GB DDR
- 2 x 500 GB Sata
- DVD RW
Here are Microsoft’s stated minimum requirements for WHS:
- 1GHz Pentium 3 or higher
- 512MB of RAM
- 70GB of storage space
- 100 Mbps Ethernet card
WHS comes in three discs. They are:
- Windows Home Server Installation DVD – use this DVD to install Windows Home Server on a computer
- Windows Home Server Connector Software CD – use this CD to install the Windows Home Server Connector Software
- Windows Home Server Home Computer Restore CD – use this CD to restore a home computer from a backup located on a Windows Home Server
After installing with the Home Server Installation DVD i was ready to start configuring it.
There is a great tutorial on installing WHS on your server here : http://www.krunker.com/2007/06/26/part-1-installing-windows-home-server-rc/
Part 2 of this tutorial shows you how to setup your software : http://www.krunker.com/2007/07/22/part-2-windows-home-server-connector/
It's all pretty straight forward, but I encountered one major problem. I could not get the remote access to work.
WHS uses port 80 and SSL port 443 for serving the Windows Home Server web interface.
But my ISP Telenet blocks all ports under 1024.. so I had to change them to something higher.
There is a fantastic tutorial on how to do this here: http://www.myhomeserver.com/?page_id=23
After following this tutorial, my web server was up and running and I could remote access EVERYTHING at EVERY TIME from ANYWHERE
and my computers were safely backed up daily so you could say I was already very happy with it.
I have to round up this post for today, but it will be continued with topics like add-ins and other functions.
Resources
Windows Home Server Site
Stay at Home Servers
Windows Home Server Blog
MS Windows Home
Server.com – Great blog and Add-in site
We Got
Served UK Home Server site. Lots of add-ins here
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