Microsoft slings out Windows Home Server beta Microsoft yesterday released an English language-only public beta of the next version of its Windows Home server, codenamed ‘Vail’. The company said it was still busy developing the software and so was fairly light on details but it did confirm that Vail includes four feature improvements. A community tech preview leaked onto …
I've been a big fan of WHS since the beta. It only does a few things, but it does them really well, and I was happy to buy it a couple of years ago.
However, Vail is big, non-compatible step up that I'm not sure the market is ready for. I expected WHS to be a fairly niche MS product that would develop over time, and it has a little, but not far enough for this new version.
It does have a few 'nice to have' features, most I suspect the old codebase could have handled, but from what I read, the safest option to 'upgrade' to Vail is buy new hardware, buy new OS, have two WHS machines running on your network and copy across. Not exactly as simple as a service pack.
Strangely, there are a few step backs as well, notably the 10 drive limit, and the move away from NTFS compatible drives in the storage pool. If your WHS died or you wanted to migrate data quickly, you could yank the drives out of a WHS box and any version of windows could read them. This won't be an option in Vail, which puts me off immensely.
I think Vail will fragment an already small userbase. I'll probably save my money and keep my 'old' WHS until the tiny atom cpu gives in.
In English, as opposed to American, "sling out" means "to throw away" or even throw a person out forcibly from where they are not wanted. So, I slung out windows 95 from my home environment some time ago and Sony are slinging out floppy discs, for examples. Think you should be more careful with your language.
You really raised my hopes of MS introducing quality control for a moment.
Then again, as lots of we correspondents seem unable to spell in our own language or use much intelligible and consistent grammar or vocabulary, despite claiming to work in an environment where a single omitted or misplaced comma can cause a disaster, perhaps we should expect no better even from those living by the written word.
I tried the demonstration version of Windows Home Server once. I was seriously unimpressed. Not only did it feel hacked together by someone who was in a heck of a hurry, but Microsoft also strongly cautions you not to use the desktop or tools that are included, because you can break WHS if you do. I never could give it more than a 30 day trial as Microsoft wouldn't send me a proper evaluation product key.
What kind of engineering quality is that?
What I finally decided on (after a lot of severe disappoints with crappy retail NAS boxes) was FreeNAS. Once you get it up and running, it's absolutely reliable and it will run on some truly crusty hardware. (One of mine is an HP Vectra VA Pentium Pro tower clocked at a whopping 200MHz. It's not "quick" but it certainly is reliable. It's probably the only Pentium Pro in the world with a SATA PCI card installed...!) Sure, it has more of a learning curve than does WHS, but it's not *much* more and the result is a lot more rewarding.
Plus, it lets you keep something else out of the clutches of the recycler for just that much longer.
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