August 27, 2009 at 6:34 am
WHS is software from Microsoft, however, there are some appliances based on WHS that you plug in and go. I don't know much about the appliances as I got WHS from my MSDN subscription.
Gaz
-- Stop your grinnin' and drop your linen...they're everywhere!!!
August 27, 2009 at 6:36 am
jeff (8/27/2009)
I guess I don't quite get it - is WHS software, hardware, or both? I thought I saw a cost of $200 for WHS. What does the last poster mean by "move it to a new server"? That makes me think it's software only, but I had the impression that when you buy WHS you get a box with two 1TB drives or something in it???
WHS is the software. I put it on an old, noisy box.
August 27, 2009 at 8:39 am
Mark Horninger (8/27/2009)
jeff (8/27/2009)
I guess I don't quite get it - is WHS software, hardware, or both? I thought I saw a cost of $200 for WHS. What does the last poster mean by "move it to a new server"? That makes me think it's software only, but I had the impression that when you buy WHS you get a box with two 1TB drives or something in it???WHS is the software. I put it on an old, noisy box.
which is fine as a way to try it out.
but since the box will be running 24/7 you'll probably want something that's able to be lower power and in a quieter case.
I build mine a few years back when you could get AMD's Turon chip and MB's that took it (that's nominally a laptop chip) put it in a quiet case (rubber grommet mounts for all drives, fans etc) and I've yet to regret it.
Doesn't need a powerful cpu. You will want a case with a number of drive bays so you can throw storage at it as needed. It's designed to run headless, accessed remotely from the client software. So you won't need monitor, kb, mouse etc once you finish installing the software.
A number of companies including HP market ready made WHS appliances, with the OS already installed, in a small box that looks a lot like a starter level NAS system (size of a medium shoebox, stood on one end) with like 4 to 6 drive bays on the front. If you're not into building your own hardware that's the way to go.
It provides a lot of other functions (streaming media to other systems including xbox, web-portal for your house that allows you to remote into your systems from outside, share photos with family etc. A bit of searching and poking around the MS site will find you a complete set of features.
Mostly I like it because it backs up ALL our systems on a nightly basis. Since we're geeks, and theres more computers at home than people (almost 3:1 now... sigh) having all those systems backed up each night is a really handy thing. And restoring a failed system (or replaced drive) is about as painless as could be: boot from CD provided with WHS, point it at the homeserver, pick which backup to restore, and go..
The WAY it backs up is pretty unique, and as a result once the first system in the house using a given OS is backed up, the others go much quicker. Also the storage needed to store redundant data found on several systems is vastly reduced.
It has it's own dynamic system for mirroring data across multiple drives for fault tolerance, without requiring you to use matched sets of drives. so expanding the system is easy, unlike with RAID. Fault tolerance is all software driven, so noworries about a hardware card failing etc.
A true *nix geek could probably come up with something similar, but I'm not sure it would be as space efficient in terms of the storage use, nor do I know what kind of client software exists to get all the systems to do their backups nightly to the central server.
August 27, 2009 at 8:47 am
A true *nix geek could probably come up with something similar, but I'm not sure it would be as space efficient in terms of the storage use, nor do I know what kind of client software exists to get all the systems to do their backups nightly to the central server.
Not quite a nix geek, but getting there. Like most things on Nixen, it's mostly manually configured. There are several tools out there to do this. Anyone interested can check out this article: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=895&tag=nl.e550
August 27, 2009 at 8:55 am
Definately build something low power. not a problem building stuff, I built half the pc's in the house.
think there are about 6 machines now, not counting servers...
August 27, 2009 at 9:32 am
Mark Horninger (8/27/2009)
Definately build something low power. not a problem building stuff, I built half the pc's in the house.think there are about 6 machines now, not counting servers...
Heh right there with you man. Only things I've not built myself are the tablet and laptops. All the other systems at home are crafted with my own hands. Been that way since the days of the 486.
Still it gets harder to justify as the prices keep coming down and my free time gets more and more valuable to me.
Especially when you consider the HP WHS Appliances (http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/mediasmart-server/#/HomeServerComparison/) start at $400 and that's including the OS, and a decent sized drive (although the base model has no extra drive bays, so you'd have to throw USB drives at it to expand, but then for the non-technical user, that's a pretty decent solution really.)
I notice their low end model uses the Atom processor, which has now peaked my interest in that as a platform for appliance type systems like this.
Still, not counting the value of your time (which if you enjoy building systems you'd consider well spent on this) I'll bet for the price of their entry level model you could come up with something fairly equivalent, with more internal room for drives etc. low end celeron or AMD (duron?), gig of ram, MB with onboard video, net etc.. case, PS, and drives... Not sure what the retail price of WHS is however.. I got mine as a reward for being a very early beta participant.
The other (not supported by MS) possibility for the true geek, would be to run WHS as a VM on a Hyper-V server, and just hand it 'pass through' drives. Presuming of course you are enough of an 'alpha-geek' to have Hyper-V at home (even I'm not that hardcore yet). Since WHS doesn't use a lot of CPU or Memory, and is mostly idle most of the time, it ought to make an ideal VM candidate.
August 27, 2009 at 9:57 am
So WHS sounds like $500 to $1000 ($200 for WHS software, $400+ for hardware).
Carbonite is $35/yr.
1TB RAID1 USB External HDD is $250
Seems like I'll be skipping the WHS, backing up 10GB+ of important docs, pics, etc automatically via Carbonite, and a few times per year doing a full system backup to the external HDD.
August 27, 2009 at 2:19 pm
jeff (8/27/2009)
So WHS sounds like $500 to $1000 ($200 for WHS software, $400+ for hardware).Carbonite is $35/yr.
1TB RAID1 USB External HDD is $250
Seems like I'll be skipping the WHS, backing up 10GB+ of important docs, pics, etc automatically via Carbonite, and a few times per year doing a full system backup to the external HDD.
1) your price for hardware is high.. Newegg has the basic HP unit for $300, OS preinstalled and ready to plug and play.. To build my own with twin 640G (5 year warranty) drives, priced out at just under $400 for everything (including software: $99 at newegg) except the case and power-supply.
2) Carbonite is good stuff.. but it's $35 per system. To backup all the systems at my house (3 desktops, 3 laptops, tablet) would run me $245 a year
3) never met an exernal drive that would walk itself around the house and backup all my sysems every night. What's your time worth?
Do what works for you. everyone's needs are different. Just don't forget to value your time and energy, or the security of having everthing completely backed up every night.
Also the utility of having a central repository for all your e-books, music, etc
Personally I find nightly backups a really nice thing. bork up a system by installing a bad driver? Teenager gets conned intl installing a 'viewer' that turns out to be nasty malware? getting the system back to how it was yesterday or the day before is about 30 minutes away more or less. That beats the hell out of completely reinstalling and patching all your software.
August 27, 2009 at 2:49 pm
Ordered some quiet hardware today from newegg. 2tb in drive space + quiet chassis, 2gb memory < 400.
Should only take a couple hours to get it up and running.
1TB Drives were less than $100
August 27, 2009 at 3:16 pm
So is this basically what's involved in building and running a WHS?
Build a barebones server - no video card, no monitor/keyboard - just a chassis, power supply, motherboard, whatever HDDs you want, whatever RAM you want, & a wireless network card.
Temporarily connect a keyboard and monitor to the onboard video just to load the WHS OS.
Once you get the system booted and running does it show up as a server on the network and you administer it remotely, scheduling backups of various other machines on the network?
Can it be set to hibernate and wake up in the middle of the night to do the daily updates?
August 27, 2009 at 4:27 pm
jeff (8/27/2009)
So is this basically what's involved in building and running a WHS?Build a barebones server - no video card, no monitor/keyboard - just a chassis, power supply, motherboard, whatever HDDs you want, whatever RAM you want, & a wireless network card.
Temporarily connect a keyboard and monitor to the onboard video just to load the WHS OS.
Once you get the system booted and running does it show up as a server on the network and you administer it remotely, scheduling backups of various other machines on the network?
Can it be set to hibernate and wake up in the middle of the night to do the daily updates?
I think it needs 1 gig of Ram, not sure if there's much benefit to giving it more. check MS site for requirements. but ram is super cheap right now in any case.
You can mix and match HD's, IDE, Sata, USB.. whatever your MB supports, with 2 or more HD's the automatic redundant storage stuff kicks into action.
Wired or wireless, I expect either would work. Mine happens to be wired using the onboard nic, and sits in close physical proximity to the wireless router/firewall for the house.
Add a cd-rom to the 'temporarily connect' list.. or slap in some old one you have laying around.
It's designed for home, so uses 'workgroup' security. It will have several shares by default, one is 'software' and there's installer programs in there for the clients. Connect to the share, run the installer from each system you want to have backed up.
There's a remote console app once you've installed the clients, that can be used to administer it, schedule the backups, create new shares, determine if shared data is stored fault tolerant or not, setup a website for your house, etc.
Normal convention is the leave the WHS system running 24/7, since it's also providing a lot of other functions (e.g. can act as a central file-server etc). You can I believe set if you want client systems to wake up to backup, or not.
August 29, 2009 at 9:01 am
I have one of the HP MediaSmart home servers and I really love the device and the concept of the Home Server. I purchased the one with the 500 GB hard drive and since I have added a 1.5 TB drive to the server. It just sits and does it's work. It holds all my music and allows me to connect back to my home network from anywhere with a network connection. I did not like some of the software Hewlett Packard installed on the server, so I yanked it out. It is a great product for home users to have an automatic backup solution for all of their home computers.
James E. Freedle II
August 29, 2009 at 1:42 pm
I reinstalled Win 7 on my desktop and things appear to be working, so I'll likely be putting WHS on the old desktop in a week or so and I'll let you know how it goes. We have a Mac and 3 or 4 PCs to backup, so while Carbonite is nice, it isn't necessarily an economical solution for me. Since I have a machine with 750GB in it and I can add more for $100-200
August 30, 2009 at 3:28 am
And I still can't understand why pick WHS, a system that has proven to have quite a few bugs, some file types not compatible etc. Not to mention hardware raid is slow and binds you to that hardware. All thou I'd probably do WHS if it supported ZFS but seeing how it does not have the latest, the best, no WHS for me.
August 30, 2009 at 5:34 am
I have had absolutely NO problems with Windows Home Server at all. The Windows Home Server that I have does not have hardware RAID as mentioned in the article would require you to have identical disks. As for not having ZFS, the only reference I have heard of that with respect to operating systems was linux:sick:. Linux is not practical for a home user as it is extremely complicated and extremely not compatible. I for one have looked at linux for over 12 years and I have come to the conclusion that I would NEVER use it for my own personal needs, I prefer to use the best operating system out there, which in my opinion is Windows. I have not studied operating system theory and design and I am not likely to. I do not trust open source software, and will most likely never will. I would suggest that unless you have read and understood every single line of code that you should not trust it either. I understand what Microsoft's motivations are and I know that they would not put anything adverse in the operating system as it would open them up to a huge liability not to mention would be a public relations nightmare.
James E. Freedle II
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