SBS Beta, WHS Vail Release Candidate Are Out

6 Comments

1. 2010-08-18 8:46 am

   Florin.Crisan

   Does anybody here use Home Server? What do you use it for?

   I’ve seen Windows Server (Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition) around a lot, but never the Home Server…
• 2010-08-18 12:30 pm

  Laurence

  Does anybody here use Home Server?

  What do you use it for? I’ve seen Windows Server (Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition) around a lot, but never the Home Server…

  Personally I can’t see the point of Home Server.

  If it was only available on pre-installed NAS (et al) servers, then perhaps I’d be more sympathetic.

  -> *nix guys wont switch

  -> many people who build their own systems will likely just re-use their XP / 7 CD (I’m not endorsing this behaviour, but in a world full of DRM and strict copyright laws; the majority of NAS servers have content that’s circumvented at least one law. So I can’t see they guy building his own NAS caring that much about paying for Windows twice)

  -> and geeks who want a more functional server will likely prefer a heavy duty copy of Windows Server

  Windows Home Server seems to be aimed squarely at the sort of people who couldn’t care less or could happily make do without.
• 2010-08-18 4:04 pm

  poundsmack

  while it’s not really aimed at us power users, it is dead simple to use and pretty effective for what it does. it’s actually a good product, but there isn’t much of a market for it yet.
• 2010-08-19 8:48 am

  Laurence

  while it’s not really aimed at us power users, it is dead simple to use and pretty effective for what it does. it’s actually a good product, but there isn’t much of a market for it yet.

  But that’s the point I’m making. Power users won’t want it and those that are below that level aren’t going to build their own home server as that, by it’s very nature, would make them a power user.

  The only potential market this has is home server pre-installs for the non-techies. But as few non-techies are going to want a home server (they’d be quite happy with the tried and tested traditional methods), there really isn’t a market for this OS yet. Quite frankly, I’ll be surprised if there will be any time in the foreseeable future either.

  Thus WHS strikes me as rather pointless.

  Edited 2010-08-19 08:50 UTC
2. 2010-08-18 3:27 pm

   poundsmack

   http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/17/windows-home-server-vail-sees-ne…
3. 2010-08-18 5:51 pm

   npcomplete

   What turned me off from the first version was how they implemented drive extender (their storage management system) and the limitations imposed. Now with Vail, it seems that they’ve switched to the block level storage based pools like traditional software raid, plus with these goodies:

   http://www.homeserverland.com/b/hslblog/archive/2010/04/28/Windows-…

   – File system level encryption (EFS) and compression are now supported for Drive Extender folders.

   – iSCSI storage devices can be added to the a storage pool.

   – Data drives in storage pools can be migrated between servers, and appear as a non-default pool. A non-default pool can be promoted to a default pool if no default pool exists.

   – To protect against silent storage errors (bit flips, misdirected writes, torn writes), additional information is appended to each 512-byte sector stored on drive. In particular, each sector is protected by a CRC checksum, which enables Drive Extender to detect data read errors, perform realtime error correction and self-healing (up to 2 bit errors per sector if duplication is disabled, and any number of bit errors if duplication is enabled) and report the errors back to the user and application. The overhead for this additional data is roughly 12% of drive space.

   That last one is quite a biggie I must say..