Simply clicking on the drive in the left pane will highlight where it is in the wireframe on the right by turning green.  The Add-in also reports other useful information such as drive temperature and speed of throughput.  We also installed the WHS Mobile Add-in, which in conjunction with its iPhone App (Windows Mobile version available too) gives us access to the server while we're on the move.

 

The Move - Once the server was up and running and the new SATA drives were installed and setup in Disk Manager, we started the 'character building' task of copying the data across from the old drives.  Moving large amounts of data around is never fun and this was no exception, taking a couple of days to complete.  The data on the IDE disks can be copied across to the server using the motherboards built in IDE line or if your system doesn't have it you can use an inexpensive IDE to USB 2.0 interface instead. 

 

Its Good to Share - Shares appear in standard UNC format -  //servername/sharename - for example //JukeBox/Movies or //JukeBox/Music,  The Samba shares can also easily be accessed from Macs or Linux machines using  - smb://JukeBox/Music or smb://192.168.0.10/Movies etc.  Each user can be allowed full access, read only access or no access at all for each of your shares.  You can give your children read only access to the music share for example, allowing them to listen, whilst being secure in the knowledge they can't accidentally delete something.

 

Flexible Friend - While you can run a limited set of apps on a Drobo and other NAS devices can run services too, there's little to beat the sheer volume of windows applications out there.  You can pretty much run any Windows app you want on this system.  This gives us a huge choice of media encoders, FTP server software, Bit Torrent clients and the like that we can run on this box too, all easily managed from anywhere either on the LAN or across the Net. 

WHS offers other useful features such as a web interface to your server and windows computers on your home LAN.  You can control the console remotely, managing your media.  Need to access a file from a friends house? Want to play that CD you ripped at home last night in work? Uploading or downloading files from your server is trivial from any other machine with Internet access. 

All these remote features can be setup automatically for you with uPnP or if your router doesn't support it or your prefer a manual setup then you can simply forward ports 80, 443 and 4125 to your servers IP.  Even if you don't have a static IP address at home WHS allows you to always connect to your machine remotely from a simple and memorable address which you get to choose - http://YOUR-CHOSEN-NAME.homeserver.com 

 

  

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The Connector - If you have other XP/Vista/Windows7 PCs on your LAN then installing the WHS 'Connector' software on them will automatically link them to the server, putting a shortcut to its shares on their desktop and setting up automated backups.

The 'single-instance storage' technology means that WHS will only hold one set of files for an OS and thereby reducing space requirements.  We backed up two similar XP Pro machines.  The first backup took up 7.6GB.  We then backed up the second machine which only added an additional 2GB to the backup folder on the server.

Files and folders can be easily restored from these backups.  You can also restore an entire machine by booting from a CD and sucking the image back from the server across the LAN.  If you're a Windows household then automated backups feature is probably worth the WHS price of admission alone.

Backup Buddy - You can designate any of your WHS shared folders for "Duplication".  This ensures those directories are stored on 2 physical disks, allowing your data to survive a single hard drive failure.  You may not want to duplicate your DVD ISO's for example, preferring to re-rip them rather than take up the additional space required to protect them.  We have chosen to duplicate all our data / documents folders and all our digital photos and that's currently taking up almost 800GB as can be seen in the nice clear pie chart graphic WHS produces in the Console.

We've heard enough stories on our mailing list to make the TV show - 'When RAID Goes Bad', users that have lost everything when one drive dies rather than being able to rebuild their array.  So whilst having duplication is a good thing, and probably more than a lot of users have currently, you still need a backup at a different location to protect yourself against a catastrophic hardware failure or even theft, fire, flood etc.

Backing up the WHS system drive seems to be the weak link in the current version.  From what we can see there's no easy way to do this, bar having a separate RAID 1 system just for it.  The partnership between the C: partition and the D: storage pool partition needs to be in sync, so imaging the OS drive with Acronis / Ghost or similar will be out of date and therefore useless shortly after it's been done.

However if the system disk does die you should be able to install a new version of WHS on a new disk which will then re-gain you access your un-harmed data, albeit with the loss of any add-ins or other customisation to WHS you had.

 

     

 

 

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Green Credentials? - The new Corsair HX 450W ATX Power Supply we fitted is "80 Plus" certified, guaranteeing at least 80% efficiency at various loads and the new motherboards more modern power management systems help here too.  Our 8 SATA lines come from 6 ports on the motherboard plus 2 more on a PCI Express Card.  We're using a mixture of Westerm Digital Green and Samsung EcoGreen drives.  These consume less power than standard disks - something that's also welcomed in a server running 24/7.

The old server consumed electricity at 140 watts while in use, amazingly the new box runs at just 95 watts.  So, even though we thought we had a relatively green CPU powering the last system, the older technology employed by its PSU, motherboard and hard drives was sucking more power.  Part of the reduction undoubtedly also comes from the fact that there are now 3 fewer drives spinning.  All this adds up to a saving on electricity for us of around £60 per year.

If you don't need a media server with so many SATA ports on board and that's capable of carrying out additional functions and running VMs then you may like to consider an Atom board.  The Atom is the Intel CPU that powers most of the netbooks and net-tops that have become so popular in the last couple of years and it can provide more basic performance at even lower power consumption.

 

 

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Get Back in Your Box - And so the lid has been re-attached and the server is ready to slide back into its home in the rack for another year or four.  For an outlay of around £600 (plus drives) we've built a high quality 8 SATA bay server that's comparable to the £1,000 Drobo Pro.  While you don't get the hot-swap-smarts of the Data Robotics system you get a similar setup that has the additional flexibility to run many services and applications.  Windows Home Server has made managing our data a much simpler task and it's brought us new features like data duplication, a web interface and remote access.  Adding and upgrading drives from the front of the rack will be easy in the future and with half the bays still empty and a potential capacity of 16 terabytes, we should get a good few years out of JukeBox MkII.

 

Windows Home Server : WHS Support Documents : Windows Home Server OEM

Great WHS Resource Sites - We Got Served : MSWHS.com 

 

Hardware Summary - Here's the list of components used for the upgrade

(approximate prices including VAT show).

 

Not a massive upgrade, but there are some welcome administration improvements mainly from a better GUI

Few products in the Microsoft portfolio have seen as positive a turnaround as the Internet Information Services Web server.

Nine years ago, IIS was a security nightmare that was regularly exploited by dangerous worms and viruses. But, beginning with IIS 6, Microsoft made significant improvements in the security profile of the Web server—improvements that have erased IIS’ bad security reputation. With IIS 7, Microsoft took many cues from open-source rival Apache, making IIS more modular in its deployment options and even relying on good old configuration files for much of the server’s set-up and administration.

Now, with the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, we are seeing an update to Microsoft’s Web platform in the form of IIS 7.5. Like much of R2 itself, IIS 7.5 isn’t a massive upgrade from previous versions; in fact, many of the new features were already available as add-ons to IIS 7.

But, all in all, IIS 7.5 is a welcome update, improving the management and deployment options for the Microsoft Web server.

Interestingly, it also seems to be acknowledging that for some Microsoft customers, IIS might have gone too far down the Apache road of (mainly) GUI-free configuration.

This new focus was clear once I fired up the IIS Management Console on Windows Server 2008 R2 and started to configure request filtering for the server. Request filtering makes it possible to build a more secure server configuration that is resistant to common attack techniques such as cross site scripting.

Request filtering was built into IIS in previous versions of the server, but setting it up required editing configuration files. This wasn’t exactly difficult, but IIS 7.5 makes it easier with the option to set up filtering using a standard GUI interface. I found this process to be relatively simple, and I liked the fact that changes made here took effect immediately, without the need to restart the service.

Also new in IIS 7.5 is the graphical Configuration Editor, which is sort of like a regedit for IIS configuration. Using this tool, I could edit and view IIS configuration settings without the need to open up the web.config file.

Another welcome change in IIS 7.5 is the elevation of FTP to become a full-fledged part of the server. In previous versions, set-up and management of an FTP server in IIS were done pretty much separately from Web server management. In IIS 7.5, FTP administration is fully integrated into the IIS Management Console.

I found this to be a very good implementation of FTP, making it possible to quickly set up secure FTP servers and tie them to my Websites. Especially nice was the ability to easily use virtual host names for the FTP sites. All in all, the FTP implementation in IIS 7.5 is one of the best I’ve seen, even when compared with dedicated FTP server products.

While much of IIS 7.5 is dedicated to improved GUI management, that isn’t the only focus. Administrators comfortable in the command line, will like the option of managing the IIS server through Microsoft’s PowerShell interface. Using the PowerShell snap-in for IIS 7.5, I was able to use commands to control and view nearly any aspect of the server. This also made it easier to use management scripts, build scheduled tasks and handle remote management.

IIS 7.5 also includes some under-the-hood enhancements, such as hardened application pool security through lowered privileges. In addition, IIS benefits from a large library of extensions and add-on modules that make it possible for businesses to add capabilities to their server implementations.

Jim Rapoza is chief technology analyst at eWeek