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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mindless1 - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
Surely the backup client can be disabled (On one of the two)? I would be very surprised if 2 WHS systems can't coexist given a configuration change if you just wanted to avoid the wasted redundancy of having both make backups. That is, unless MS had deliberately chosen to prevent the two from getting along.ATWindsor - Tuesday, September 4, 2007 - link
Does it souppert proper raid, like raid 5 for instance? That fits my use a bit better than this duplication of files. WHS looks interesting, but seemingly a bit to primitive to be honest, seems to be missing quite a few more or less nescessary features.Rolphus - Tuesday, September 4, 2007 - link
The choice of OS should be entirely separate to RAID considerations. Software RAID5 is a bit of a waste of time, seeing as any performance advantage over just mirroring the data would be more than offset by software parity calculations. I don't see any reason why a BIOS-level RAID system (as supplied by many high-end and server motherboards and add-in cards) wouldn't be supported by WHS; Windows 2003 Server supports any RAID level you care to throw at it.mindless1 - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
Most people won't care about parity calculation overhead, it's not as though the system is being used like a PC or workstation, that's practically ALL the system would be doing besides sitting idle, particularly given the rough spec of a 1GHz or more processor which is not at all needed just to serve files. Maybe with GbE, you might want a 300-400MHz processor to keep networking performance good but on a system that old you'd probably be bottlenecked by the PCI bus before anything else.yyrkoon - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
What is wrong with software RAID, if that is all the system does(server storage) ? In my book, implementing *any* so called server OS *needs* to have at least RAID1, and should have RAID5 in software. If not, there is not realy reason to stop using WinXP Pro, with a few registry hacks tp bypass the RAID5 limitation.Anyhow, why pay for something that is lacking when you can get an OS that does it for free, or another earlier version of windows that will do it with a few hacks, and yu're already familiar with.
As I said in an earlier post, I used WHS for a few days several months ago(early beta program), and did not like what I saw. So . . .
ATWindsor - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
Software raid5 can have very good performance, modern computers are fast, besides the main consideration is not wasting so much space, if you want to have som security for your files, you get by on loosing 1/4 insted of 1/2 of the space.The main advantage off WHS is the whole storage-pool-setup, I hope they implment somethin similar in w2k3.
Gholam - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
I tested software RAID5 on an nForce4 SLI motherboard (DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR) with Silicon Image 3114 chip and 4x WD 500GB drives. Reads were in 11-14MB/s range, writes sub-10MB/s, and CPU load was near full, on an Athlon 64 4000+.ATWindsor - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
Try to test a proper software-raid, instead of the inbuilt nforce-crap, just because you tested a poor solution doesn't make all solutions bad.Gholam - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
It's not nForce, it's SiI3114, nearly ubiquitous on higher-end motherboards of that era, as well as present on many lower-end PCI cards. Building RAID5 on an "affordable" solution from Silicon Image, Promise and such will give you exactly that kind of performance, as well as guarantee a high probability of data loss due to driver/firmware bug. In order to run RAID5 you need a proper controller from Adaptec/LSI Logic/3Ware, and that costs big bucks.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, September 4, 2007 - link
It only supports proper RAID if you can configure it all in the BIOS. Any kind of softRAID that needs Windows' help isn't supported. Basically it needs to appear as 1 disk to Windows.