A New Kind of Home Computer: Windows Home Server Preview
by Ryan Smith on September 4, 2007 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
WHS as a File and Media Server
The second major feature Microsoft is pushing with WHS is its use as a file and media server. This is a natural ability for WHS to have since file serving is a core component of Windows Server 2003, and we couldn't imagine Microsoft having not shipped WHS with this feature. As we'll see however, for a file server WHS is surprisingly hit and miss.
It's important to note that the connector software is not only a backup client, but it integrates the computer into the server on an account and file level. WHS does not do active directory domains (important because home versions of Windows can't connect to those) but instead offers a simpler level of integration. When a client is integrated into the server, the default action is to create accounts on the server that are related to the accounts on the client. Here WHS and the connector will copy over the account names and passwords (forcing the account owner to set a real password if they are not using one) and then give every account their own personal folder on the server. WHS will furthermore keep the accounts in sync between the client and the server, so that passwords remain the same on both, particularly important so that clients can access the server's folders without needing to log into the server separately.
By giving each account on each client a server account, this serves to simplify access controls on the server. WHS forgoes the full abilities of Windows' access control lists for a Unix-like read-write/read/none level of permissions for each shared folder for each account. Permissions can only be set at the shared folder level however, and subfolders can only inherit the permissions of the folder that contains them unless the administrator goes outside the bounds of the WHS console.
Besides the account folders, WHS comes with five public folders: music, videos, photos, public, and software, and all accounts automatically get read-write access to these folders. Additional folders can easily be created from the console, with accounts getting no permissions by default. The much loathed guest account also makes an appearance here, and while it's disabled by default it's possible to enable it and give it access rights to all the shared folders the same as any other account.
It's also with the shared folders that the folder duplication feature becomes available. Windows doesn't duplicate backup data (since the data is already at one place: the client) but can duplicate any of the shared folders, including the account folders. From having used WHS so far, the ability to select what folders to duplicate (e.g. photos but not videos) is proving to be incredibly useful.
WHS also offers a degree of local backup protection for these shared folders, besides the redundancy in case of a drive failure. Surprisingly, none of Microsoft's own manuals for WHS mention this, but the shadow copy service on WHS is by default used to also track changes in shared documents, meaning the Previous Versions feature is available to recover old documents should the current ones be damaged/destroyed. This currently is somewhat limited in availability since on the client side only Vista and some XP clients support this feature, but via RDP it's possible to log into the server, which can also use the Previous Versions feature on itself. The buffer for the amount of data shadowed here is fairly small, so these backups are not as robust as the backups done by WHS of whole computers. But since most media seldom changes, it's enough to recover files in the most likely situations.
Finally, all of these shares are offered as a normal Windows SMB share. This is worth noting since there are viable SMB clients available for all the major platforms, so WHS can easily be used as a server even in a mixed network. Furthermore the WHS development team has also been looking at other uses for the shared folders, going so far as to seriously propose using a WHS server as a back end for Mac OS X Leopard's Time Machine backups.
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leexgx - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
i think you mean {with out duplication) as if you got 2x 200gb with it turnd on you only get 200gb any way
i agree if raid fails it can be an problem some times getting the data off it
With WHS just plug the disk into an other pc and goto disk manager and Give the disk an Letter or mount it as an drive folder and you see all the data on it
tynopik - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
> i think you mean {with out duplication) as if you got 2x 200gb with it turnd on you only get 200gb any wayno, if you were duplicating EVERYTHING (which most people won't want to do) you will have 400gb*. 1st copy on the 400gb and half 2nd copy on one 200gb and other half 2nd copy on other 200gb
leexgx - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
darn miss read both posts i just read it like 200gb and 200gb a 400gb so assume last one was the 2 200gb put together to make 400gb----other post
i got you now on the 3 one if all 3 happend you lose data
tynopik - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
the other thing i forgot to mention is selective duplicationwhat if you have 500gb of files but only have 5gb that need duplication?
WHS is much, much more efficient in such a scenario. Only duplicating what needs to be duplicated and merging the remaining space
i can't wait for MS to include this feature in regular windows, it's freaking fantastic
ATWindsor - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
What if I want to have added protection on all my stuff? With raid 5 I loose 25% of the space, with WHS-duplication I loose 50% (and the performance is worse). Even people who wants an easy setup has diffrent needs.tynopik - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
> What if I want to have added protection on all my stuff? With raid 5 I loose 25% of the space, with WHS-duplication I loose 50% (and the performance is worse).that is only true if
1. you have 4 drives
2. they are all equal size
consider a scenario that i mentioned elsewhere where you have (2) 200GB drives and a 400GB drive
with raid5 you would only be able to use 200GB of the 400GB drive wasting half it's space right off the bat. So you are left with essentially 3 200GB drives. Then parity data takes up another drive leaving you with 400gb of space. Which is the exact same amount that WHS gives you.
but i will tell you this, RAID sucks, especially RAID5
you mess up one thing and you lose the entire volume
even with raid 1 i had more problems than it was worth
raid is just going to cause more difficulties and support calls, the exact opposite of what you want for a 'black-box' like this
and i'm not the only one who feels this way
http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles?&id=29">http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles?&id=29
[quote]
However, at the agreement of our support staff, I estimate that anywhere from 25% to 30% of our customers with RAID will call us at some point in the first year to report a degraded RAID array or problem directly resulting from their RAID configuration.[/quote]
that sort of problem rate is simply unacceptable
and what if suddenly you decide that there is a bunch of stuff you DON'T need to duplicate? there is no graceful way to handle that with raid
WHS if simple, flexible, powerful and reliable (in the sense it's not likely to cause problems like raid systems do)
ATWindsor - Saturday, September 8, 2007 - link
There is many ways to mess up a whole lot of dta, raid or non-raid, I'm pretty sure i can make the datapool disappear pretty easy in whs also. (it can be recovered of course, but so can i raid5-volume).If people use problem-prone onboard raid-options on mobos, I'm sure quite a few run in to trouble, that doesn't make raid5 a bad idea for everyone. Same with your example with diffrent-sized disks, i happen to have 4 diks of the same size. Thats the problem with lack of options, people with needs diffrent than the exactly the ones that happen to be included gets a worse product.
AtW
ATWindsor - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
What if I want to have added protection on all my stuff? With raid 5 I loose 25% of the space, with WHS-duplication I loose 50% (and the performance is worse). Even people who wants an easy setup has diffrent needs.Gholam - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
Performance of consumer-grade RAID5 controllers is EXTREMELY low. Sub-10mb/s typically, with a high CPU load, as they don't have a dedicated XOR engine. Server-grade RAID5 controllers will give you good performance, but they cost in the $600-1000+ range, and when you're using consumer-grade 7200rpm SATA drives, you can buy half a dozen extra drives for the cost of the controller.ATWindsor - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
Software-raid has good read-performance if properly implmented, much better than a single drive. If you are going to have many drives, you must buy additional controllers anyway, so the price-difference isn't that big.