Anyone else using Windows Home Server 2011?

pb3

I'm fully aware of the controversy over the removal of Drive Extender, but on the plus side WHS can now be picked up for 45 quid or so.

It is based on Windows 2008 Server R2 and it looks like you can install most of the roles and features if you wish, though of course this is not supported by Microsoft.

I've installed Sharepoint Foundation 2010 on top of Window Home Server and also installed the smtp feature so that I can configure Sharepoint to send email alerts.

The above process was a bit fiddly but it works really well. The possibilities are endless and the product is certainly orders of magnitude less in cost than the Windows 2008 Server product.

The possibilities are endless - I don't work for Microsoft by the way

leemoss

Im using it on an HP Microserver with a couple of drives in RAID 0 for the main storage, backed up onto another drive.
Fairly impressed with it so far, some nice features and the web interface is great.
I'd certainly recommend it, although you can get pretty much all the features from free linux distros etc, this is very easy to setup and does exactly what its meant to do.

System

Do you run a DHCP server from it?

pb3

!!!!!! wrote: »

Do you run a DHCP server from it?

No I don't simply because just about every adsl or cable router these days already has a basic DHCP server built in.

However there is absolutely nothing stopping you from assigning the home server a static address and installing the DHCP server role.

In reply to another response - Yes most of the functionality available with WHS is available with Linux. The beauty of ths product is that is appears to have a reasonably functional version of Windows 2008 Server R2 under the covers. I'm assuming that Microsoft have limited the number of connections to the product, but other than that the customization possibilities seem endless.

Note that you do take a risk in customizing WHS as Microsoft could well release future updates that break things. It is stilll a brilliant product for experiementers like myself.

tocsin

I'm in the process of moving from V1 to 2011 (stuff bought, winding down the storage on the EX490 so that I can re-use the 2Tb 3rd drive from there).

The new box is based around an HP ML110 G6 (2.4GHz X3430, 8Gb RAM), and will have 4x 2Tb drives. I was in two minds about how to set these up (didn't fancy tying in to hardware RAID), so the current plan is:

- drive 0: OS and data
- drive 1: mirror of drive 0 to provide "folder duplication", using the OS software
- drive 2: unduplicated data I have elsewhere (e.g. films, TV recordings)
- drive 3: unduplicated client PC backups

And external drives as needed to do backups of the server, of course.

I'm also planning on doing more with the server (like the OP's Sharepoint install), but the main purpose is secure family-wide backup.

What do the MSE tech-heads think?

John_Gray

I would think that describing anything with the sentence "the possibilities are endless" (twice even!) is something of an exaggeration, perhaps even an over-exaggeration!

But maybe I'm just an old cynic...