I've been part of the top-secret beta program over the past month or so of Microsoft's new Home Server product, and since it's now been released CTP, I can finally talk about it.
The software is actually really cool in concept. You basically allocate a box as your "home server". Many of us are getting so many computers around the house that it's becoming impractical not to have a dedicated server machine for sharing files and running printers, so it's a good idea to offer software that helps automate some of those tasks.
The Microsoft Home Server software looks like a kind of stripped-down version of Windows 2003 Web Server, but with a few dedicated applications for interacting with your home network. You access the main control portions of the Home Server via a "Terminal Services"-like client. It only allows you to connect to your Home Server, and does not provide you access to the Home Server OS, but a dedicated Home Server control application. When sitting at the Home Server system itself, you have access to a very pared-down version of Windows Server.
The thing that is specifically both nice and bothersome about Home Server is the backup software which is one of the key features.
On each computer where you want to interact with the server, you install a component (Windows-only) that runs from the system tray. The icon gives you a quick display of the "health" of your network. If green, healthy. If red, ill. I guess -- I'm still a bit confused about that.
The backup occurs every day automatically at a time you schedule. The scheduling takes place on the server, which is the big problem. If you leave a desktop computer off during its scheduled backup time, Home Server complains about the fact that the desktop did not perform a backup. In fact, it's pretty insistent about it, setting the network alert level to red across all desktops on the network.
It's very troublesome that if I leave a computer off for several days (like Abby's, which she uses infrequently) then it generates this type of error.
More concerning is that you can't set the backup schedule of the computer in the control console unless that computer is on and connected to the server. It simply gives you a message like "This computer is not connected, so you can't do that." So you have to turn on the computer that doesn't need backed up (because it's been off) in order to turn off the backup, thus the notification.
I understand that if a desktop is actually on and fails to contact the server, that could be a serious problem, since data loss on that machine would not be recoverable. But the annoyance factor is really high when you don't want to follow such a rigid schedule.
Forget about using Home Server notebooks that are not always home, and frequently on the road, still trying to "phone home" to the server that doesn't exist.
The Administration console shows backup status of every registered network PC, and can show you nice pie graphs of disk usage based on purpose (backup vs files). It's also supposedly pretty easy to set up storage redundancy in USB drives, where the additional drives will function like a RAID array. I didn't have any spare USB drives to try this out, but I'm told the process is fairly plug-and-play.
When the backup does work, it's seamless, quick, and amazing. You can get old versions of files from any backup you've retained on the server, and the server has rotation rules that will keep many versions back.
Oh. Wait. I could never get that single-file restore feature to work. It universally failed to work, actually. It's supposed to create a folder on your desktop that gives you access to the files from that backup. Although it created the folder on my desktop, double-clicking it to open it resulted in a strange system error each time, something like "Network resource no longer accessible".
One would think that being part of a beta program, I would have better records of this. You know, I did. But here's another issue: The bug reporting on their beta site requires that you submit a log from a special tool along with your report. I can't be bothered to install this additional tool, and cause the server to fail again just to create your bug report. I'm not Microsoft QA, this thing is supposed to work reasonably well out of the box. If you want my feedback, make it easier for me to report. As a matter of fact, while I'm complaining about it, the beta support site really stinks.
Where was I? Oh yeah, Windows Home Server...
The shared folders feature worked really well. It's based on the tried and true SMB network format, so I would expect that it would work well. I was able to connect to the server's regular shared folders and move files in and out.
One of the cool things about Windows Home Server is that it works with the XBox 360. I could see the Server on my network and play music and videos from it. It could play MP3 and WMA audio, which is what I have all of my music encoded in, but it can only play WMV video, which is terrible because I can't be bothered to convert all of my Xvid or DivX videos to yet another format for playback.
Also, it doesn't support well any realtime streaming to the XBox 360 like a Media Center PC might. That's disappointing. There are no tools that I know of that will do live conversion of local files from one format to the format needed by the XBox 360, even if downsampling is required. This one feature seems like a braindead "gotta have it" feature for anyone who would actually buy Windows Home Server. Otherwise, it would be better to buy a whole Media Center PC and some off-the-shelf backup software or service.
There is apparently some feature that lets you access the Windows Home Server remotely via the web. Sadly, there are problems with this feature. Verizon (my ISP) blocks incoming port 80 requests, making it impossible to connect to a server on that port. Many ISPs do this because they don't want you to run servers when paying residential prices for your broadband.
Geniuses who constructed the software say basically, "Connect to http://your.domain.com, and click 'Log On'." Well not everyone has a domain that points to their home internet connection. I do, but that's beside the point. Even so, being on DHCP, you would think that the server would offer some way to update a DynDNS (or other dynamic DNS provider) entry so that you could connect this way. Nope.
Searching in help for "port" yields no results, so even if I wanted to change the incoming port for the web server, I have no idea how that would be done.
I admit that I did not bother to axe my system so that I could try the restore disk. I have a functioning home network, not a testbed.
The Home Server offers no other server-like features. No email. No FTP. No DNS. It cannot be used as a firewall. For all of the security focus Microsoft has had over the past few years, you would think that they might provide some server-based firewall/web-blocking/filtering/proxy/whatever support with Windows Home Server. Maybe that's not a good idea?
I don't know what Windows Home Server will cost. For free, I can set up a Linux server with SMB support. I can use rsync to sync my important files to the server on a schedule of my choosing, and I can do it from systems that are not Windows-based in addition to those that are. I can also run a full-featured web server on a port of my choosing, in addition to email, DNS, firewall, and DynDNS updater.
What does Windows Home Server make easy? It is really easy to install. That part went very smoothly. If they improve the backup after the beta release I have (you'd almost have to to keep users from routinely ignoring the little perpetually red tray icon) then backups are so easy that fish could do it. Sharing files over SMB doesn't get easier than with the platform that made it standard.
Administration with Windows Home Server is a snap. If you're not tech wiz, it's really easy to get things going. I'm left scratching my head though, wondering how much a person who is not a tech wiz needs a dedicated home server. I suppose that it'll become more prevalent, but the day after I installed Windows Home Server, I saw two push-button Linux-based look-alikes announced. They're probably not as seamless, but with a little elbow grease they'd probably work just as well, and I imagine that anyone who would drop some Benjamins on a server box and the Home Server software is at least that invested in the process.
The worst thing about Windows Home Server is that the upgrade from beta 2 to CTP is going to wipe out my data. And there doesn't seem to be a way to backup my server. This seems like a very strange oversight.
I've put a lot of my data on the server to give it a reasonable test run. I'm really disappointed that I'll have to practically reformat to upgrade to the latest version to see if it fixes any of my issues. Even though I couldn't report them.
In spite of all of the above, Windows Home Server is a really neat product. I'm excited to see Microsoft have interest in this area, which I think will grow quickly as many people are growing their home networks.
Pat's probably never going to invite me to beta again...
Linux Server is the way I'll go. :D
Actually, the worst part about this is that many of your facts are wrong. I don't much care if you give a negative review of something if you're accurate, but some of the things you say are not true:
1) You will not loose your data on upgrade. I've upgraded continually, including to the CTP, without loss of data. It blows away the system partition, but the install replaces it.
2) The failure to play divx or whatever your chosen video format is related to the 360 and not home server. Home server will stream stuff other than WMV. It IS a shame that there is different support between the dashboard and MCE, though. On a plus note, there is pre-existing AAC support, and MPEG-4 and H.264 support on the horizon.
3) Again, related to the 360 and not WHS: I have seen guides on how to play other formats for re-encoding audio/video to play live on the 360. It takes a reasonably beefy system to re-encode video real-time, though.
4) Did you try installing any of the other services you mentioned?
WHS is software. You could write similar software for any platform you wanted. Will it happen anytime soon or be nearly as good? Probably not. Will they have the same feature support? Again, probably not. Everybody is quick to jump on the "me too! We're working on that too!" platform (MS included), just to keep competitive, but only time will tell who carries through with that claim and who does it well.
In what I would consider a bad design choice (although they had their reasons), you're meant to put your machines to sleep rather than turn them off. If your machines were in sleep mode, they would automatically wake up, back up, and go back to sleep. Yes, a red tray icon means there's something wrong, but it could be many different detected things, like a hard drive going bad, besides just that a machine wasn't correctly backed up.
The tool they ask you to run is already on the server... you do not need to install it. Look in the home server directory. You just need to run it and submit the results to the site. Secondly, the whole point of a beta program is that they're trying to locate bugs they might not otherwise catch. The releases you see are pretty extensively tested, both by their test team and by internal beta testers. I run it for weeks before it goes publically.
I admit the beta site sucks... I have dealt with it for multiple betas, and there's much to be desired. But my questions for you are: Where have you seen that is better? What did they do that you liked? Did you file any bugs related to the beta site?
Please don't join the ranks of the people who complain, but do nothing to help solve the problem. The whole reason for participating in a pre-release program is to help make the final product better. Yes, as a bonus, you get to see a product before it's released, but that's a benefit, not the reason people are invited.
If I ever think not to invite you to a beta of something, it will be because you have done a poor job as a beta user, not because you were critical or truthful. If you were going to be critical, be critical in the beta forum instead of waiting and complaining about it on a public forum afterward. Report bugs in the appropriate place, where they may be seen and fixed. I'm actually quite surprised at this. I realize that you didn't do this specifically to be cruel or give bad press, but the effect is the same regardless.
What's difficult for me is that I have no idea what has been announced publically and what hasn't, so I can't really talk about it. It's frustrating.
Any inaccuracies are only due to following what little documentation I have available. Apart from that, everything I've said is my experience as I've experienced it, for which there isn't much else to call it but fact.
1) It may not wipe out my data if I upgrade, but the notice specifically said to make a backup because that might need to happen, and it didn't seem like the usual CYA notice. It also did not mention how the backup could be done. This made me consider the idea that I might want to backup my server's backups, and I don't seem to have been provided a method to do this.
I've invested time and effort in using this thing like a real user would, and actually have real files on it. Maybe that was a bad idea, but right now I won't do the backup until I know that the data on there is safe elsewhere, and being that I've been told outright that it's not, I'll have to wait until I figure out that backup process.
2 ∩
Perhaps the conversion can't be real-time without a beefy processor. Still, the solution might have been to have the Home Server take away some of the time issues that come up with transcoding. Even the cheap system I assigned to this task could crank away all day converting videos from a queue for the purpose of WMV playback, but instead it sits mostly idle.
4) There are two questions to follow up that question. First, is it possible? Second, shouldn't the server come with those features available, considering that others already do?
Implications that other similar projects are simply WHS mimics are erroneous. The other projects I mentioned seem to have been in incubation for a while. And a few home-user-friendly variants of linux servers have been available for quite some time. No, they don't offer as tight integration with Windows desktops as Windows Home Server does, but why would they? Nonetheless, their server technology is just as solid as Windows, and possibly just as easy to use. The documentation I've seen is certainly better.
Whether the computers can backup when they're asleep or not, I've commanded the system to do a manual backup of my notebook every time I've turned it on within range of the WHS for the past week. Every time, I am able to see the server console from my notebook, but it fails to perform the backup. I can't remove the record of the failed backup from the server, nor can I remove the notebook itself from the list of clients, and so every computer on the network shows a worthless red "network health is critical" icon in the tray.
The beta site is awful -- It is literally unusable. I attempted to report problems on several occasions, failing each time. If it wasn't for that, I might have made these issues available to the beta program. It was simply not possible. Keep in mind that my intent is to stop and report an issue when it happens, not also be bothered to have to figure out a clunky reporting site when something is already wrong with my own systems.
Just now, I tried to report these issues again thinking maybe that I was just overcritical. I searched for my issue among the many there, and not seeing any stand-out identical issues, I started writing my report. I finished filling out the entire report (at no small cost of my own time), then got to the bottom where it asks for results from a diagnostic program. I locate and execute the program, but the diagnostic program reports an error of its own when run. I search for bugs related to the diagnostic program, find some (some are closed because they were reported as suggestions instead of bugs, but were apparently not copied over directly as a bug, why?), and see that this new issue has been corrected with a new version I can download. I seek to obtain the new version, but the download is not available. More than a half hour into reporting this single issue, I give up.
The lie of the beta process is that the tester gets any benefit. At the rate I've been using up my own time, I could probably afford a fully-licensed copy of this OEM product. I'm all for making software better, but the barrier for helping out can't be painful like this. And you know I was dedicated to this - I bought a new PC to run it on.
My intent in writing this article was simply to talk about my experience with Windows Home Server. When I set out writing, I had a high opinion of the software. There are a handful of stupid things that bother me, like the persistent red icon. It is frustrating not to be able to participate in fixing them, since that is the point after all. But trashing the software wasn't the mindset I set out writing with.
In spite of feeling I had a generally positive experience with the software, I wrote what my experience was and it turns out that upon re-reading it doesn't sound so good. Should I have not been critical? I suppose I could have said only "I tried it" and left out everything else. That wouldn't have been true at all, though.
Certainly you can call it fact, but facts can be true or false. It's even a true fact that you had the impression that you did, but that doesn't make what you've said right... for example, you will not loose information on upgrade (discounting hardware failures and such). It may be true that your interpretation of their wording gave the impression that you would, but that does not make it the case.
The problem, like practically all reviews, is that they tend to focus on the bad. It's just human nature. You don't think about all the good things that happen... as a matter of fact you take them for granted because it's expected. Truely, if things go exceptionally well, you don't notice them at all. I think these things tend to go sadly overlooked (true about life in general, really).
I have never asked you to lie or to leave things out. I do not believe in censorship of that sort (Probably the only sort of censorship I'm for is against slander/libel). I'm not even saying that you can't write opinions (positive or negative). If reviewers can't put their opinions down, then there's little point for the review. I'm saying that it's unfortunate that you said things that weren't true, even if it seemed that way to you.
While it's great that you really used the WHS as a normal user, in the documentation I read, at least, it warned about the possiblities of data loss and whatnot that can occur with beta software. It cautioned me to be careful and keep alternate backups. It's just trying to urge people to be careful... it's dealing with important stuff, and there's always a risk, especially with pre-release software.
I'm not saying that they are clones of WHS, or that they started afterward (although they probably did, because WHS has, I'm told, been worked on for a sadly long time). What I'm saying is that you only heard about them after WHS was announced BECAUSE of WHS being announced. Companies always jump into this "me too!" mode when competitors announce things.
Also, I don't know of any released product that actually does what WHS does. Yes, there are NAS devices (I have one already), devices that do backup (some even with redundancy), and even some media sharing devices (although these tend to use their own proprietary technology) and software that will let you reach your machines from the internet (a feature I still find scary). I don't know of anything that combines these together into a single, pre-packaged system. If you're talking "I can run linux and install X, Y, and Z free packages and get similar functionality", then sure, of course... it's just software. These things have been available for a long time on Windows as well. It's more about the pre-packaged integration, feature set, and stand-alone nature.
It's weird that you're having so many problems with the beta site. I've posted a few bugs there myself and, while it's painfully arduous (especially in the WHS case), it worked fine. I'll see about posting some stuff later.
Obviously, I'm very supportive of WHS. It has TONS of issues... bugs and things that I think could make for a significantly better product. My overall experience with it has been great, though... I'm able to do a bunch of stuff that wasn't easily possible before. It enabled all sorts of things for me, and got me thinking about new ways I could use it... I'm still coming up with ways it will make my life better. When I upgraded to a bad build a while back, I felt the loss of functionality from the server being gone.
If nothing else, this experience showed me how naieve I still am about a variety of aspects of software development, particularly those related to marketting. I had always thought it odd, but, when someone influential is reviewing something, it is very typical that bigger companies assign someone to help walk them through various features and point out features they may otherwise miss or take for granted. I had always thought this odd... shouldn't it be able to stand on its own? Maybe, but experience shows that you can't depend on a reviewer to notice everything (good OR bad) about a product.
Also, I don't believe that beta testers get no benefit. I think that a good beta tester is interested enough in the product that they're willing to accept some pain in order to get a product that better meets their needs. As a beta tester, you have a unique opportunity not only to both eliminate any bugs that may affect you, but also make feature requests that can get into the product before it is released. If you care about the product or its purpose, this is of great benefit to you. Whether it's worth your time (certainly some people value their time more than others), only you can decide.
If the beta site was ideal, would this even be an issue? Was it the product itself that you have significant problems with, or is it the beta site that's causing most of your negativity? Yes, there were obviously bugs with WHS, but how bad were these versus the time you spent with the beta site?
With WHS in regard to what I've written here, there are a lot of things that I expect should work well before release that don't in the version I have. And it's particularly frustrating that, given the chance to influence change, I am dissuaded from doing so by the process involved. This is antithetical to the idea of a beta release.
As I said, it's my fault for using the beta software without a net. Still, when the release is final, it is surely missing the essential component I was looking for - a backup process for the server itself. That is something that would have been handy while (and could have been before) upgrading to CTP.
Manufacturers like Excito are delivering server appliances using pre-configured Debian distributions that do essentially what WHS does, plus additional services. I believe I've read that WHS is an OEM product - meaning that you can't buy a boxed version, but only in a PC pre-configured with it - so I think this is a comparable shipping product. And that's not even one of the two announcements I saw, which happened in the days between receiving my installation disks and the PC I was going to install it on, before the public announcement of WHS.
I haven't found a use for the server beyond a simple file storage and backup solution. I'm really not sure what I'm missing. I am very encouraged by the idea of WHS, but I think that it needs to do a bit more to justify itself. Streaming video or conversion would do it. Maybe an email server/proxy or web proxy would do it. Firewalling might do it. Centralized OneCare? The backup feature is really slick when it works right, but that and file storage is not enough in my mind to justify a whole separate server OS product.
I would hope that if I was able to report my issues that they would have been solved and I wouldn't have been able to say anything bad about WHS. I expect that if I install the CTP version and my issues are corrected, I will write more about those corrections. If not, then I hope that whatever issue I have with reporting bugs will have been taken care of so that I can actually report things.
No, the issues with WHS (though there were a few) are not very significant, but I do have a real problem with my computer telling me that my network health is critical based on a failed backup that I can't turn off. I have come to ignore the notice, and that is unhealthy.
Still, those problems exist for me, and I don't think that being able to report them would do as much as having them corrected. They seem like easy technical problems to fix, which just compounds my frustration over the difficulty with the beta site.
While I love the idea, I actually some concerns about the neat folder redundancy available on WHS.
Say that I have two 120GB hard drives on my system, giving me 240GB in total. Then I decide to make my folders "movies" and "music" redundant (that is, to span across different disks). The remaining store is not made redundant.
Eventualy I end up having 80GB of movies and 20GB of music -- that is about 100GB. On the remaining of WHS storage, I have 80GB of some random stuff that I didn't care to make redundant.
Maybe I am missing something, but I see as a potential problem that if I start adding non-redundant data into my WHS, I can possibly tak space that should be used to guarantee redundancy to my movies and music folders, thus breaking the redundancy.
Sure WHS could report these problems to the user, the user then goes to buy another HD to add to the system. What would happen then?
* Would the system move files around the disks to make sure redundancy of all chosen folders is being kept?
* In case of failure, would I know which disk failed? Which non-redundant data is lost?
Also, another thing that is incorrect with your review/thoughts, is that Windows Home Server does include its own Dynamic DNS client... it uses its own DynDNS-type service, routing through YourName.HomeServer.com
In fact, if you went through the setup like a normal consumer, you would have found that not only does it do this for you... but it also uses UPnP to set up the port forwarding on your router (since most consumers have no idea how to do that). Does Linux set all this up for you out-of-the-box?
Why would I want to use whatever.homeserver.com when I already have a DynDNS service with a real domain?
Is the implication that Linux can't poke holes in my router for incoming traffic without my assent? Good.
I am sure that many improvements have been made to WHS since I wrote this. I guess I just don't think it's for me.
@ Pedro:
you won't have multiple copies of the same data but rather file linking in the backup. from a user perspective, browsing the backup would look like two or more copies but what actually happens is that one instance of the file is backed-up and if an identical file is found in another folder, it links to the already backed-up copy. single file appears in multiple instances.
this is a feature of Volume Shadow Copy where even if you backup 6 times a day, it would only backup the entire thing once and every successive backup would just include changed files (or rather changed data, think previous versions in Vista and Server 2003). linking like above would be used.
hope that cleared things up for people.