Fushigi
Storage Is My Life
I thought I'd run a thread about setting up & using Windows Home Server.
First, as noted in another thread, I built my home server using a 1.5TB Seagate drive. Upon installation, it automatically set up a 16GB OS and a rest-of-drive data partition. Installation was almost painless. It asked a couple of questions, confirmed the drive could be wiped, and went off on it's own. I'm not sure how long it took to install; it said it could take hours but the estimator came up with 51 minutes. I left to run some errands so it wouldn't take any of my time.
The rest of the machine was what once was my Ubuntu Folding setup: MSI X48c Platinum with a C2Q9450 and 2GB of low latency DDR3. Corsair 650W PSU. Right now it has a Radeon X1950 leftover video card which I may upgrade later for GPU Folding. And an el-cheapo Philips DVD drive.
So, the 'almost' in the installation was networking. It explicitly does not support a wireless connection & says 100Mb wired is the minimum (shows some age there .. 'n' wireless could be faster). Not a problem for me but I thought I'd mention it if someone was considering a remote, unwired location for their server. Anyway, it did not support the motherboard's Realtek Ethernet controller out of the box. I wound up using the XP driver from the MSI utility CD. IMO a fast connection should be strongly recommended for the workstation backup capability but should hardly be a flat-out requirement; some people may be fine with slow backups, especially if their workstations are 802.11b/g attached.
Installation also failed to detect the graphics card as anything but a generic. But it read the VESA modes right so it did auto-set 1024x768x24bit - what my old monitor can do. So I haven't bothered to load the Catalyst drivers.
WHS states it is designed to run headless. You manage the basic functions via a console/connector app that you install on each workstation. The app was easy to install on all but one machine where the AVG firewall had to first be disabled. The MS troubleshooter could do a better job of mentioning this potential issue.
Alerts generated by any machine int he group are populated to all machines. Could be annoying, I suppose, but it immediately flagged one workstation as not having AV software. That decision is intentional as the machine is a full-time Folder and isn't used to surf or do anything else that would attract malware. Luckily, you can set it to ignore a message.
The console is not like RDP. It presents basic panels that most PC-literate folks should be able to handle. The main categories are Computers & Backups, User Accounts, Shared Folders, Server Storage, and an icon/category for Network (messages).
I have to read about the media sharing; you can move your media to the server & let it be shared, but until/unless I set up redundant storage I would rather not have it stored in just one place. The main reason for getting WHS was, afterall, for a centralized backup solution.
There were four discs in the installation package: WHS, the Connector piece, a Workstation Recovery CD (nice that they supply it), and another (I forget what it holds). There was also a small getting started guide and installation sheet. While I definitely will want more documentation, it was enough to get it set up & running and backing up workstations without having to hit the MS site or dive into some PDFs (exception being the networking issue; it could have mentioned that XP drivers work for NICs that don't auto-detect).
It is currently running the SMP Folding console client.
Backups appear to be single-threaded. My wife's PC is backing up now and if I try to start a backup of another machine it doesn't. I'll have to wait until my wife's backup finishes to see if they queue up or if requests are ignored while it's busy. I don't know if it is because it is the first backup or what, but it sure is taking a while.
First, as noted in another thread, I built my home server using a 1.5TB Seagate drive. Upon installation, it automatically set up a 16GB OS and a rest-of-drive data partition. Installation was almost painless. It asked a couple of questions, confirmed the drive could be wiped, and went off on it's own. I'm not sure how long it took to install; it said it could take hours but the estimator came up with 51 minutes. I left to run some errands so it wouldn't take any of my time.
The rest of the machine was what once was my Ubuntu Folding setup: MSI X48c Platinum with a C2Q9450 and 2GB of low latency DDR3. Corsair 650W PSU. Right now it has a Radeon X1950 leftover video card which I may upgrade later for GPU Folding. And an el-cheapo Philips DVD drive.
So, the 'almost' in the installation was networking. It explicitly does not support a wireless connection & says 100Mb wired is the minimum (shows some age there .. 'n' wireless could be faster). Not a problem for me but I thought I'd mention it if someone was considering a remote, unwired location for their server. Anyway, it did not support the motherboard's Realtek Ethernet controller out of the box. I wound up using the XP driver from the MSI utility CD. IMO a fast connection should be strongly recommended for the workstation backup capability but should hardly be a flat-out requirement; some people may be fine with slow backups, especially if their workstations are 802.11b/g attached.
Installation also failed to detect the graphics card as anything but a generic. But it read the VESA modes right so it did auto-set 1024x768x24bit - what my old monitor can do. So I haven't bothered to load the Catalyst drivers.
WHS states it is designed to run headless. You manage the basic functions via a console/connector app that you install on each workstation. The app was easy to install on all but one machine where the AVG firewall had to first be disabled. The MS troubleshooter could do a better job of mentioning this potential issue.
Alerts generated by any machine int he group are populated to all machines. Could be annoying, I suppose, but it immediately flagged one workstation as not having AV software. That decision is intentional as the machine is a full-time Folder and isn't used to surf or do anything else that would attract malware. Luckily, you can set it to ignore a message.
The console is not like RDP. It presents basic panels that most PC-literate folks should be able to handle. The main categories are Computers & Backups, User Accounts, Shared Folders, Server Storage, and an icon/category for Network (messages).
I have to read about the media sharing; you can move your media to the server & let it be shared, but until/unless I set up redundant storage I would rather not have it stored in just one place. The main reason for getting WHS was, afterall, for a centralized backup solution.
There were four discs in the installation package: WHS, the Connector piece, a Workstation Recovery CD (nice that they supply it), and another (I forget what it holds). There was also a small getting started guide and installation sheet. While I definitely will want more documentation, it was enough to get it set up & running and backing up workstations without having to hit the MS site or dive into some PDFs (exception being the networking issue; it could have mentioned that XP drivers work for NICs that don't auto-detect).
It is currently running the SMP Folding console client.
Backups appear to be single-threaded. My wife's PC is backing up now and if I try to start a backup of another machine it doesn't. I'll have to wait until my wife's backup finishes to see if they queue up or if requests are ignored while it's busy. I don't know if it is because it is the first backup or what, but it sure is taking a while.