Windows Home Server–Why don’t more people use this?

 Windows Home Server—what is it?

Windows Home Server http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/windowshomeserver/default.mspx

I have a small network at home with 8 computers attached to each other.  I had various shared external harddrives across the network, but finding things became cumbersome and unwieldy.  I wanted something like a server that I have used for many years at my place of employment, but I didn’t want a full server.  I wanted something that was easy to set up and manage and provide a central location for videos, music, and other files.  My search began and I quickly found Windows Home Server.  HP quickly began selling their MediaSmart server for far more than I wanted to spend; I purchased a copy of Windows Home Server and used one of the PCs I already owned to set it up.  The minimum specs for WHS are 1GHz Pentium III CPU, 512MB of RAM, 80GB of hard drive space, DVD-ROM drive, and a wired Ethernet adapter.  No problem.  In fact the most difficult part of the entire setup was buying the software.  WHS is not offered in retail stores.  Thankfully you should be able to find a copy on Amazon, NewEgg.com or TigerDirect for around $120.  What you will get is the server install disk which is installed on your server.  You will also get a disk with the connector software on it.  This is installed on the other PCs on your network so that they can be automatically backed up to the server.  Lastly, you will receive a recovery disk that you can boot into to recover the backed up data from the server. 

Installation of the server software and connector is pretty straightforward.  Once you install he connector software, you can then modify the user privileges in case you don’t want your teenage son to have access to the software directory where you keep all the installers for a few hundred necessary applications.    Plus you can then manage the individual PC backups and see what has been successfully backed up and what hasn’t.  You can even kick off the backup from the server console. 

Sharing audio and video from the WHS server is pretty trivial.  Once you have all the media on the server, it can be accessed by anyone with access on the network. 

One of the nice features WHS provides is the ability to add multiple hard drives, either internal or external, into a storage pool.    So now my collection of 100GB, 250GB, 500GB and 1 TB drives can be placed into a giant storage pool on the server and utilized as multiple terabytes of storage.  This was a nice addition to the features since now I can increase the storage size by just plugging in a new hard drive and selecting to add it to the storage pool from the server console.

Lastly, the server software allows me to connect to my home network from any internet connection.  I can access my data, configure my server or even stream media like music or video.  Very handy for those long nights in hotels after conferences or training sessions.  Just log in and stream some music or a movie.  Very handy.

All in all, WHS has impressed me and is now a required part of my home network infrastructure.  I imagine this might work equally well in a small business environment where the employees need access to a central bank of files and be able to automate the scheduled backups.  Microsoft has done an excellent job scaling down a full server into something fit for a home or small office environment!