Windows Home Server 2011

Well, it's about that time of year again to think about backups.

My initial posts on this blog were raving about Windows Home Server and detailing the creation and installation of my Windows Home Server version 1 machine. After a particularly painful experience with my previous server running Ubuntu, I was wowed with Windows Home Server and how it made so many things so much easier to achieve, at least in an environment where all my other machines were running Windows. As far as media serving duties and performing automated backups, it was like a breath of fresh air, at least initially.

I had plans to take it further moving the server hardware into the garage (there's no point keeping a back-up in the house if the house gets burgled or burns down in a fire!) and already have a hold drilled in the wall of the house that just needed to be widened to feed an RJ-45 cable through. Also by the power of the excellent Drive Extender technology in WHS v1 I planned on adding an obscene amount of extra storage over time and have the box work as a media hub too.

Then a change of job and finances put hold to these plans. The WHS box stopped playing nicely, essentially I would switch on the box and the hard drive activity would never subside, resulting in the box working but becoming incredibly slow. As a result of this I found I could back-up my laptop, but the desktop with its larger quantity of data would never complete a backup.

I tried for a while to solve this issue, but alas with no luck.

Then WHS 2011 was announced with better audio streaming, but shock horror without the awesome Drive Extender!

I, like many others, was unhappy about this (and I still am), but overall the update looked like one to get... when I had the money.

The upshot is that I lost interest in fixing my WHS v1, it literally seemed like more trouble than it was worth,  especially considering that in the meantime I started working in London again so had less time to tinker.

Worryingly as a result I've not had a complete backup of my primary desktop machine for some time now. Dangerous, and less than ideal.

Then I became single, so although I had fewer hours in the evenings to tinker after my commute home, I did have some free time... but still apparently not enough motivation to fix the WHS v1 box.

A few days ago I stumbled across a piece of news saying how the WHS 2011 software could now be had for a few pennies over £37. This seemed like a bargain too good to be true and re-kindled my interest in sorting out my backups, so I ordered myself a copy which has now duly arrived.

Now I needed to start thinking about hardware to run Windows Home Server 2011 on. My original WHS v1 box was an old shuttle micro ATX machine I had recyceld from desktop duties. I had to become quite creative with this form factor to get my hard drive array in, it's short on memory, the processor is old and only 32 bit (unsuitable for WHS 2011) and the network interface was only 100 base-t... Oh, and even by removing the redundant graphics card it still eats 90 watts of power.

Lo and behold I stumbled upon the HP ProLiant Micro Server is selling for £250... and until the end of the July 2011 has a £100 mail-in rebate!

The server only comes with 1 gigabyte of memory and a 250GB hard drive, so I'll be taking them out (The HDD may find its way into my desktop machine) and putting in 4 gigabytes of ram, and either 2 or (more likely) 4 two terabyte eco green drives,  hopefully in a 0+1 raid array (which will be just mirrored if the motherboard can't handle that).

I figure this configuration SHOULD be quite safe, so I'll then move all my media to the new server ready for DLNA access from the rest of the network (other windows machines, the XBox 360 and the TV itself) and remotely.

The server should draw less than 30 watts fully loaded and has a 1000 base-t network port, which should offer faster backups and general access.

After this machine is up and running it will be time for stage 2: my hifi has just stopped playing CDs so I'm planning on getting a dedicated surround system for the TV, along with some additional kit (possibly a Sonos system) for the kitchen, bedroom and lounge itself. That's a long way off just yet, but should be possible in the not too distant future, and now with WHS serving the local media.

The server box is ordered, I'll order the additional drives and memory later, and I'll update on how it goes in a later post.