Guy Adams on Technology

Well, finally after moving over 300 GB’s of data, fighting with two different RAID controllers and a failing CD-ROM, I managed to get the above mention product installed on my old Pentium 4 PC.

Installation was an interesting process to say the least, after discovering that my CD-ROM was failing I fitted a new one which then wouldn’t boot the WHS setup DVD. Remember the method I got Windows 7 installed on my Asus EEE PC, I formatted a spare USB flash drive using bootsect.exe and these wonderful instructions. The boot loader appeared with a Vista / Windows Server 2008 style interface which I thought was odd considering WHS is built on Windows Server 2003 technologies.

Then after this nice graphical user interface the installation went into an XP / Windows Server 2003 style text mode setup which as you can see from the picture states “Windows Server 2003 for Small Business Server setup”

Eventually after the text mode phase the server drops back to the nice user interface and begins downloading a number of Windows updates. After about a total of 1 hour 20 minutes and seven, (yes SEVEN!) reboots the server was ready for use.

The whole process required little or no user input and upon the first real boot the usual Server 2003 log on screen is displayed. Once logged in you given an immediate warning about the available Server 2003 administrative tools which can potentially break your WHS with wrong use.

After that you mainly work out of the WHS Console which is a simple user interface to back end tasks for your server.

So far I’m impressed with the overall end user experience of WHS, I can see why Microsoft only really released it to system builders, the installation process is a real mix of old and new and with seven reboots didn’t make for a good experience.

The console configuration of users, folders, computers is simple yet effective and once installed I had all my configuration setup and running in less than 15 minutes.

I particularly like the options for storage, when adding storage to the WHS you can enable it as a RAID backup to another drive already installed or as purely additional storage. Also you can duplicate individual shared folders across multiple drives which gives an excellent degree of backup against hard drive failure. In my case this is perfect, where as before I have always had a mirror RAID setup in my server at the hardware level to protect against a disk failure, this has meant I’ve lost 50% of the potential storage, due to one disk protecting another.  Once more I have my laptop and PC do full image backup’s to the server which take vast amounts of space, whilst these are important, I do not consider them critical and so this vast amount of space is also wasted when mirrored across two hard drives. With the WHS, I have no need for hardware RAID anymore which means I maximise the storage, then using the folder duplication option on shared folders I can have only the most critical data copied across two drives.

I have not yet looked at add-ons and the  PC backup features but plan do so over the next week and post a little more feedback.

Tags: Asus EEE, WIndows Home Server, Windows Server 2003