Windows Home Server 2011 signed off Microsoft has announced that Windows Home Server 2011 has been signed off for release. With system builders now working on specific form factors, WHS 2011 solutions are expected to hit the stores in May. An evaluation version will be offered this month to MSDN and TechNet members. Aimed at home users with large pirated …
Might I recommend taking the following into consideration:
- 1 exteral drive of 1tb. A - it's not enough. B - you need to back it up. Buy 2 x 2tb, or even a RAID for the main storage drive, like a Drobo, if you can afford it.
- Serving Media libaries. Don't use Itunes (though it does work ok). Instead, get something like twonky media server; you won't be tied to apple itunes or devices then (though they do work ok)
- Get an eyeTV USB; you can control TV and media centre (front row) using a simple apple remote. The wife will love you.
- Give the Mini room to breathe. The old ones especially get very warm.
- Power cleaning. Yes, get a UPS. And get a descent one - by the time you've connected all the external drives and devices, you'll pull down much more than the 40w Apple claims.
Isn't that what the Mac Mini essentially is?
Or are you just hoping for a pretty, cuddly, touchy-clicky interface to share said files and hand you your very own turtleneck when you get up in the morning? Sorry, not sure if Apple have patented that yet, and if they haven't patented it, they sure wont release it.
Is it because you want some built-in backup protocol to the device like MS offers? I'd have thought you'd be better off sticking FreeNAS on a spare/low cost tower full of disks or buying a Drobo/NAS box and using Chronosync or rsync for your backups. Either solution will be able to network serve media.
You mean there is multimedia worth watching ?
TV crap. 85% movies crap and not even seen on DVD let alone theaters.
of remaining 15%, less than a third could be tolerated when viewed twice.
Thats what off season repeat TV is for.
Who has time to store let alone watch this crap ?
No doubt there are kids who download all and sundry so their parents have to buy drive space to stash it on. Thats what USB drives are for. So why dedicated OS and servers ? Too many people dont have lives IMNSHO.
I think what the OP wants is essentially an iTunes server. A Mac Mini with SL Server is simply over kill.
I'd like one too. About £500 with a couple of internal 1TB RAID drives, and play nicely with an Apple TV without having to have a Mac on somewhere else.
Either that or some sort of cloud service that does the same job, and won't cost me more than £500 over 5-6 years (the probably life span of a home server thingy).
No DE = totally pointless pile of crap.
There really is zero reason to buy WHS 2011. It does less than its predecessor and requires more resources to do it.
I've gone through their list of "what's new" and there's only two REALLY new features :
1) Silverlight remote streaming - why you'd ever want to use it is beyond me (I suspect nobody will ever use this other than as a novelty "look at this" feature);
2) Windows Server 2008 R2 File Services - this is why they removed DE. Frankly its not a good enough reason, 2k8 file service features are pretty pointless for a standalone server with no DC on the network and mainly static data.
Every other "Whats New" feature isn't. They can ALL be done on WHS v1.
WHS 2011 will sink like a stone as there is simply no reason to buy it. I suspect WHS v1 unassigned licenses will be appreciating in value quite dramatically now :D
I disagree- I cant wait until V2
the big thing is drivers - I have never been able to find compatible Server 2003 drivers for my Graphics card or Blu-ray player. I also had issues streaming things from WHSv1 over the network. I ended up not using DE as it was this that was causing me problems.
I now have 2x 2tb drives in the PC for storage one is backed up to the 2nd drive nightly.
I have been using the beta versions of V2 for a while and think its awesome.
There are NO "Windows Server 2003 drivers". There are XP drivers and there are Vista drivers (for 32 bit). If you're telling me that you cannot find XP drivers for a gfx card and bluray drive, but you CAN find 64-bit drivers then I'm going to call bullshit on that.
"I now have 2x 2tb drives in the PC for storage one is backed up to the 2nd drive nightly."
Yes and Drive Extender did this automatically on the fly so I'm afraid I'm going to assume you don't know what you're on about, for you surely don't.
DE also balances additional disks so when you added a third drive it'd move stuff from the first two such that the disk usage remained consistent across all three drives while STILL maintaining two copies of the data on different physical disks.
If you'd actually used v1 you'd know what the problem is with removing DE. You didn't so you don't.
If what you mean is you can't bare-bones restore as you don't have the 64 bit drivers to connect to the server via ethernet then you do. They are on your computer - try copying them to the boot media you use for bare-bones restore.
I have one USB stick that will bare-bones restore 6 machines (server OS restore as well). That encompasses XP, Win7 and Linux partitions/OSs.
All WHS v2 gives you is pretty graphics and redundant file systems functions (as there is no DC) which is utterly pointless given WHS is meant to be headerless. Oh and it limits you to a 2TB "partition" (as disks are just disks now - no DE) which is pretty funny when I look at this one with 8TB storage pool - automatically balanced and copies maintained.
WHS 2011 is the end of the road for this product line. DOA.
it is an Pointless WHS 2011 with no DE (funny as i was at an Microsoft event and he was talking about DE in WHS 2011 and foundation version had DE, but the news was very new at the time so i did not bring the very bad info he was giving out same goes for saying vista or 7 has no backup on home versions that is also incorrect)
i could do with setting up an WHS 2003
You know every time I hear some linux fanboi go on about how linux can be a proper windows substitute it just annoys me.
But equally, why on God's green earth would you buy a Windows Home Server license for a job that can be done well with a simple linux distro.
Do Microsoft make any money on Windows Home Server?
I know that sounds really dumb when its MS involved but basically :
WHS v1 was Win2k3 server with a load of customisation (policies/scripts) and a Janet & John interface so it'd be intelligible to technophobes.
You can still rdp into the REAL desktop and to all intents and purposes its Windows Server 2003 with 10 CALS. The only restriction (although you can get around it) is that the WHS box cannot be a DC. It'll happily run mailservers, dhcp, dns (caching as no DC) - anything that 32-bit XP would run really. However the price was a fraction of that of Win2k3 with 10 CALS :)
Oh and it had DE of course which, once you've used it, is an absolute joy.
Yeah I know, its MS. Stunned me really as its so useful - you get usage balancing and physical redundancy and IF the server dies then you can unplug the disks and just pull the data off on another machine - no RAID to worry about. You can backup the storage pool easy enough to an external RAID box although it does take time - I do it once a month.
I realise that isn't rocket science but the fact it allowed you to shove a load of disks into a box - varying sizes etc - and have a storage pool that balances usage and offered redundancy was great. The fact it rebalanced on the fly and had decent backup management made it a hidden gem.
I doubt they made any money but that's not unusual for MS - they don't really understand how to market things these days.
WHS v1 has turned me from a "Gah why did you do that, it'll take me ages to fix that" father to a "you plug that USB stick in, turn it off/on and wait until its fixed" father :D
Doubtless, this will be the same visionless piece of junk that WHS has always been. There is a MASSIVE opportunity here, if only Micirosoft would understand the architecture needed to secure home computing and rid the world of junk mail, to give but two examples. TADAG.com has an architecture that would give Microsoft a clear, global lead but the company were so focussed on lifting the IPR on the first bit they saw, they never got their hands on the real prize...
David Gale
CEO
SITFO.org
then what about a Plug Computer - http://blog.amahi.org/2010/08/11/amahi-for-the-marvell-plug-computer-released-get-yours-free/. Even if you don't want a PC that small, Amahi running on a normal server can do all you want. Mine is a DLNA server, a central backup location, file server and I run Asterisk on it to provide an intelligent home phone system.
... a decent NAS will do a good job, usually quiet and takes up no space. I have 2 Netgear ReadyNAS devices with about 2TB between them, they both do DNLA for the TV and Bluray player to pick up, CD's and DVD's get bought copied and dumped in the loft or sold on some second hand flea market unless I want to keep the cover art work.
At somepoint I'll look to find a film service that will directly download to the NAS rather than feeling lazy buying a copy on DVD and then downloading a decent quality version via Torrent.
Mine is a crappy old desktop machine rebuilt with Ubuntu Server in the corner of the room. It does everything from file / print / music / backup / intranet / security camera / database server and provides an online backup for remotely hosted sites and databases.
Total cost - the price of a couple of external disks to act as a rotating backup. I'm no Linux geek, but can recommend this approach as a fun (and cheap) project.
I'm a technical user of the Windows file system, and a Linux/BSD/Sun OS with NFS and SAMBA is not the same. Security is becoming more compatible, but file locking is still a big area of minor non-compatibility. Which is a total failure if your application depends on it.
Having said that, I'm filled with dread every time MS makes an "improvement" to SMB, like they did again with server 2008. Every really horrible thing you ever heard about MS file systems is true, and was some subtle bug which wasn't picked up before release because it only affected 0.001% of all users.
As was the data-corruption bug in Drive Extender, which was presumably one of the factors which lead to DE being canceled. For a good discussion, see "http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/whats-the-real-story-on-the-windows-home-server-data-corruption-bug/348"
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