WHS 2012

Windows Server and Windows Home Server are two different product lines. Home server runs over the top of a possibly cut-down Server install, and is optimised for home use.

There's no news about the next version of WHS, or even if there will be one. It certainly won't be 2012; the last version was 2011 and it defeinitely won't be on a one year product cycle.
 
If MS decide to create a new WHS based on Windows Server 8 then I would be looking forward to the disk pooling feature.

To be honest I wouldn't expect much in the way of new features beyond that, so it could be quite a short development cycle to tweak and test the existing features on the new server platform.
 
It's a lot cheaper for a kick off.

But it's mainly how they've customised it to make it much easier to use:
- Easy user admin and shares
- Centralised client backup
- Media sharing

It could all be done on Windows Server (or even the client OS), but most things are working out of the box or pretty easy to configure.
 
Yes, it's a server designed for someone who isn't a geek. The first version of WHS could be adminstered by pretty much anyone who can operate a mouse. The second version moved away from that sadly, but still nowhere near as complex to use as a standard Windows Server edition.
 
Thread res!!

So yeah, looks like there will be a 'home server' just in the form of windows 2012 server essentials, bit rubbish in that it will be a lot more expensive but whats everyone's thoughts now ?
 
Stay on WHS2011. Other than Storage Spaces, which I won't trust my data to, WSE2012 offers little new - and in some respects less...e.g. won't allow you to install other roles such as WSUS which WHS2011 allows.
 
Im still on WHSv1. WHS2011 was a step back, and Server 8 Essentials looks like an even bigger step back and considerably more expensive. I think my original WHS cost me £80 or something?

Drive Extender with a console front end, the frankly epic backup tool, and the ability to still have a full on Server 2003 system running underneath is just brilliant.

The only thing it doesn't do is Remote Apps, but thats not a big enough issue for me to want to move to 2011 or 8. I can see me using v1 for a considerable time yet.
 
Combat squirrel said:
yes and also 'home' use even if not strictly WHS, as it has DHCP etc and all that.
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It disables DHCP during install if it detects another DHCP server, such as your router. DNS is enabled though.

Skeeter said:
Im still on WHSv1. WHS2011 was a step back, and Server 8 Essentials looks like an even bigger step back and considerably more expensive. I think my original WHS cost me £80 or something?

Drive Extender with a console front end, the frankly epic backup tool, and the ability to still have a full on Server 2003 system running underneath is just brilliant.

The only thing it doesn't do is Remote Apps, but thats not a big enough issue for me to want to move to 2011 or 8. I can see me using v1 for a considerable time yet.
Click to expand...

WHS2011 isn't all bad as at the very least it gives compatibility with 4K advanced format drives, which can be problematic on WHSv1.

Also depends on the size of your shares, but unless a share is bigger than an individual drive it's probably not so much of an issue.

But which ever way you look there's compromises. Ideally I'd want WHSv1 features (with improvements) on a W2K8R2 or W2012 platform. I guess the writing was on the wall when they disbanded the WHS team and moved the product into the SBS area...
 
ChileanLlama said:
WHS2011 isn't all bad as at the very least it gives compatibility with 4K advanced format drives, which can be problematic on WHSv1.

Also depends on the size of your shares, but unless a share is bigger than an individual drive it's probably not so much of an issue.
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The advanced format drive issue is easily fixed (on WD drives at least) with a jumper.

And I have shares well on the way to being larger than the 1TB drives I have.

Basically WHSv1 offers me (almost) everything I need. I think the biggest issue with any future home server will be the cost though. Isn't W8 Server Essentials going to be about £400?
 
Skeeter said:
The advanced format drive issue is easily fixed (on WD drives at least) with a jumper.

And I have shares well on the way to being larger than the 1TB drives I have.

Basically WHSv1 offers me (almost) everything I need. I think the biggest issue with any future home server will be the cost though. Isn't W8 Server Essentials going to be about £400?
Click to expand...

Even with the jumpers or supposed native backward compatibility I still saw problems with most of these drives. Basically a lot lower level of performance, coupled with the constantly running demigrator.exe, meant I'd often see stutters with streaming full fat HD content.

But I agree WHS 1 was a good product ahead of it's time.

With the death of DE I just decided to go for a proper hardware RAID. Expensive yes, and I've never looked back.

WSE2012 is shown on the MS site as $425. Many will find that expensive but It'll be down to the individual as to whether that's worth it or not. There's always Amahi if they don't like it.
 
ChileanLlama said:
Stay on WHS2011. Other than Storage Spaces, which I won't trust my data to, WSE2012 offers little new - and in some respects less...e.g. won't allow you to install other roles such as WSUS which WHS2011 allows.
Click to expand...

windows server also includes a safer file system, though not sure if that's made it into Server Essentials.

WHS 2011 was a massive step backwards for me. The connector isn't working with one of my computers, the lack of volumes above 2TB is crippling both for backup (I cant backup one of my multi-drive pcs), and for data (I have 4.1TB of files to serve, which WHS v1 handled fine - duplicated even!).

WHS 2011 also cant restore PCs using UEFI bioses, and I assume that's true of WHS v1 too, so I'm going to give Server Essentials a try on my spare box.
I'm going back to WHS v1 for serving data, and trying essentials for client machine backups.
 
ChileanLlama said:
Even with the jumpers or supposed native backward compatibility I still saw problems with most of these drives. Basically a lot lower level of performance, coupled with the constantly running demigrator.exe, meant I'd often see stutters with streaming full fat HD content.

But I agree WHS 1 was a good product ahead of it's time.

With the death of DE I just decided to go for a proper hardware RAID. Expensive yes, and I've never looked back.

WSE2012 is shown on the MS site as $425. Many will find that expensive but It'll be down to the individual as to whether that's worth it or not. There's always Amahi if they don't like it.
Click to expand...

It's also possible that there'll be a cheaper OEM version, that many vendors sell with a trivial piece of hardware like a cheap motherboard or even ram stick.

I never noticed the lower performance of large format drives in WHSv1, but i was careful to choose ones that got good reports in the v1 community. Also, i never used the server for streaming - each client connected to it had its own player, it just accessed the movies, etc. I never saw any stuttering this way.
 
All my drives are WD Green ones with jumpers on, and I've never had an issue. I did have a Samsung drive that caused no end of hassle as it required a piece of software to change the settings that just refused to work, so I ended up sticking that in my PC and getting a WD instead.

My WHS is just a file store, backup manager and torrent box, and it does the job perfectly. I know I could use WHS2011 or WSE2012 and setup a RAID under it, and use other tools to manage my backups, but nothing comes close to the 'plug it in, turn it on' simplicity of WHSv1.

Its going to be one of those great ideas that not enough people used to make it worth while.
 
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