Testing Windows Home Server
On our search for a good file server and centralized backup solution, I stumbled across Windows Home Server. The description sounds very good and seemed to be the perfect solution for our office: this server system automatically backs up Windows clients over night and has a unique data-storage system, which makes it possible to add and remove different harddrives to the storage, making it larger without the hassle of moving files from one drive to the other. It’s a kind of software raid (stripe).
It also comes with a handy administration console, which can be accessed from every client machine. This console can be extended easily with addins by third party software developers. As some TapiRex customers already asked about a Windows Home Server console addin for TapiRex, it was a good point to get started trying this new Windows Server operating system.
So I tried to find it in the MSDN Subscriber downloads, as we have several subscriptions to MSDN Universal, which theoretically includes all Microsoft operating systems and all other software. As I was unable to find a download there, I googled the web and found out that Microsoft decided not to make Windows Home Server available in MSDN Subscriber downloads. Urgh. So we pay lots of money to not be able to get access to a Windows operating system to develop new addons for it. What a decision…
So I just ordered a Windows Home Server license from eBay, which was delivered quickly and did only cost around 90 Euros.
Installation
When installing the Windows Home Server incl. Power Pack 1 (which is based on Windows 2003 Server) on one of our servers in our server rack, it stumbled upon our 3Ware RAID controller, which is installed with 2 x 160GB harddrives as system drives in a mirrored array to speed up the operating system. I was able to load additional drivers for that controller from an USB stick, but when the system rebooted after the first installation step, it has forgotten about the driver.
Googling for this issue, I had to find out that this is a bug in the Windows Home Server installation 
. As the text-based setup does not have access to a USB stick to reload the drivers, I had to go out to buy an external 3.5″ USB disk drive, as the setup only accepts additional drivers from the A: drive. Do you remember 3.5″ disks? It was not that easy to find a disk to store the driver to get past this installation step. These disks have gone so rare here in the office 
. Previous installations of Windows 2003 did not have this problem…
But after that, setup was pretty easy. I was able to install all hardware components and to setup the Drive Extender. After setup, you have to install a small client connector software on every client machine that should backup to that Windows Home Server, which was pretty easy as well.
In-day-usage
The good thing is that the backups worked pretty well. Also, some of the available plugins from third-party developers are very useful.
But there also were some problems:
Delays in accessing shared folders: we experienced some delays in accessing shared folders on the server. Every employee in the office has some drives mapped to shared folders on the file server. This includes a personal folder and some general folders for everyone. While browsing in these subfolders on these drives, there was sometimes a lag of several seconds that makes it impossible to work with it fluently. For example, we store our downloads company-wide in a folder on the file-server. But the “save file” dialog in the webbrowser sometimes hung up for up to 20 seconds before it was able to show the folder and save the file. Once the data transfer starts, it’s fast and reliable.
Bug in drive’s size-calculation: When you map shared folders on the Windows Home Server as local drives, Windows XP and Vista are unable to show the correct drive size. After searching the web and asking some experts in Windows Home Server forums, I found out that this a known bug in Windows Home Server and that you can’t do anything about it:
Popups on all client machines: when you have the client connector software installed, all warnings from the Windows Home Server or one of it’s clients is shown on every client machine. So every user gets popup messages like “Computer X does not have virus protection installed”, “Backup on machine Y was not sucessful”, and many more. I was not able to find a way to customize these popups so that there are not shown to our apprentices for example.
So, after nearly 2 weeks in production, I am currently installing Windows 2008 Datacenter on that server machine, as the problems shown above disturbed our daily workflow that much that it was not worth it. We will install Windows Home Server as a VMWare virtual machine instead to do some software development on it. A PamFax addon is also an idea for it. What do you think?
I will report back how this all worked with Windows 2008. Does anyone have a different suggestion for a solid and fast file server operating system + client backup possibilities?
Comments (13)
[...] The full story is available here. [...]
WHS Disturbed our Daily Workflow « MS Windows Home Server on 15. January 2009
In answer to your final problem, you can disable these popups. Right click the Connector icon in the notification area. Unclick ‘display network health notifications’.
Andrew Johnson on 15. January 2009
If you right-click on the tray icon on a client, you have the option to disable those notifications. Just clear the “Display network health notifications” check box.
In addition, I see correct displays of available space on mapped network drives. Not sure why you’re getting those odd results.
Ed Bott on 15. January 2009
Ok, found that setting now as well to turn off notifications.
But main problem was the slow network browsing on network folders. We have Windows 2008 Datacenter now and it works like a jet rocket compared to WHS. Will post a review after some time in production.
The incorrect space on the drive came because WHS only shows the free space of the first drive in the Drive Extender stripe. So the 133GB free space where on the first HDD of D: drive. The other drives (~3TB) are ignored by WHS size calculation.
Christoph on 16. January 2009
Well, as when I purchased MSDN VL through a channel reseller, I was told clearly what to not do, which includs using the software in production environment.
I was told MSDN is only meant for use of test and design.
If they are okay with your way of using it in office, I’d really want to spoil those licenses in my office:)
tirer on 16. January 2009
I know that MSDN licenses are not for production use. But before we spend loads of money for production licenses, I always like to test before buying it.
We had to buy WHS licenses and it turned out that it’s not working for us. As explained, we want to develop addins for WHS as well, but we did not get a license from MSDN for software development either.
Christoph on 16. January 2009
You didn’t have to buy the licence, you could’ve downloaded the 120 days trial edition or waited just a little more for whs to be available on MSDN (it’s coming).
The network lag is a serious issue, somebody from the WHS team should look into that asap!
A setup tip from the WHS team is to make sure that the system drive/first drive is the largest. This is recommeded because all files go there and are then distributed. However I’d love to see an option to change this; ie. set another drive as the main “landing drive” for files.
Also it should be possible to set a user as “admin” and by default only that user would see Health notifications from the Connector.
Jarle Nygård on 16. January 2009
Kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison (Datacenter ‘08 vs. WHS). WHS is (for better or for worse) not designed for an office environment. I’m quite happy with the pop-ups – if there’s a problem with things, I find out (no matter who notices it first, wife or kids). The backups & restores work spectacularly well. I have no issues with the shared folders, perhaps you had some other strange issue (like your drive problem)?
Adam on 16. January 2009
How would a mirrored raid setup speed things up? I would think it would slow things down if anything. If you had them set up to strip data across the two drives that would speed things up.
On my gigabit network with 5 PCs response time for accessing folders in WHS is only a hair slower then accessing folders on the client machines
Rob on 17. January 2009
It seems that you did not do proper research first. See the above comment about installing a large drive as the system drive. Google “WHS landing zone”. It’s a known issue.
I do agree about the MSDN subscription, kinda sucks.
I personally have had zero problems with slow network saving. This may be caused by your RAID1 setup.
Also, WHS does NOT like RAID. Period. The WHS team has been very clear about that in their blog. For that matter it does not NEED raid. Oh, and RAID1 may speed up READ access, but is slows down WRITE access (a lot). If you want speed go with RAID0.
“It’s a kind of software raid (stripe).” – Actually it is more like a software JBOD as you can add disks of any size without loosing space.
Kevin
Kevin on 17. January 2009
Christoph,
In your closing remarks you mention looking into hosting Pamela apps on WHS. Has anything been done in this area?
I’d like to move some of the owrkload from my client to a server to get the fans to settle down a bit.
Thoughts?
Doug Strahm on 26. June 2009
Have you totally dropped this? I have been running a WHS box for 18 months now, recenly i had a 500Gb HDD fail (previously 2 x Samsung 500Gb hdd’s), i decided with my usage going up and how the unit had been very stable i would upgrade the drives to 2 x 1.5Tb WD drives.
Well since re-installing and recoving the data from a back up. I have been experienceing huge ammounts of lag. the only thing that has changed in the unit is the HDD’s. I am searching for a solution as well. The one new message that is happening is i have a warning on boot that a driver failed to load on boot, upon searching the fault list it is near impossible to identify the driver at fault. (My thinking is the HDD drivers?)
twhcreations on 25. January 2010
What HDDs are you now using?
Christoph on 27. January 2010