When Microsoft announced Windows Home Server earlier this year, it was greeted with a mixture of curious disdain and eagerness. Some questioned what the product offered over existing solutions, while others welcomed it with open arms. It’s at once hard to explain and easy to understand what Windows Home Server is, but it’s worth getting to know…
I have using Windows Home Server Beta 2 for the past few weeks now and its pretty leet. Microsoft has made a fairly easy yet powerful server OS that most users should be able to figure out. It took awhile to install ( over 2 hours ) but I blame that on the beta. Home Server makes it easy to share files over a network and to backup multiple computers. After installing and setting up the server, you run an app on each computer you want to connect to the server and it will take care of adding it to the server for you. It has an auto disk management that will take care of duplication ( software RAID ) and defrag. I can even have my 360 connect to it and get photos, music, and videos off the server. The only issues so far are you can’t add users with no passwords ( means I can’t add my parents comp ) and it has a few stability issues. I would love to see vidcast/podcast support ( I currently use Democracy Player to download vidcasts and then share them for my 360 ) built into the OS and some kind of media conversion. The screenshots below are from the console app which lets you remotely control the server.
Based off what I have seen so far, Windows Home Server is off to a good start and after some tweaking and maybe a couple new features and it will make for a nice OS.
“It’s built using a mix of new and not-new sever technology, but whereas we previously believed it was based on a client OS, Windows Home Server is in fact based off of Windows Server 2003. Dropped behind a suitable firewall, this should be a strong server product that meets many emerging needs in the computing household.”
It lives in your closet, is completely remotely managed, backs up your stuff, stores your videos, music, photos and makes your data available to you everywhere. Plug in additional hard drives into it, it redistributes the data onto the other drives.