MS Home Server vs Server 2010

S

Speedo68

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 1, 2004
Messages
142
Hey Guys,

I have a pressing need to setup a new Storage Server for home use. I currently have a couple of NAS at the house that are filling up. Yeah, I am up to 5TB of storage. Music and photos mostly. Yeah, that much music, record XM radio like a maniac.

Anyway, I want to build a small server to help manage my files. I really like my QNAP NAS's. But want something that's more versitale. I have a setup already to go. But wanting to ask a few questions before I pick.

MS Home Server - or - Server 2010

I will be running a quick Xeon 5667 or 5677 - 12gb RAM - and a SAS setup wtih 8 1TB 10000rpm drives. Got a server chassis with dual 650w psu's. So hardware is not a problem.

I know that Home Server is more for "ungeeky" households versus Server 2010. I have Technet so cost is not an issue. I just know that Home Server has some apps that are pretty cool.

Are their any add-on apps for reg Windows 7/Server 2010 that work like Home Server? How about sync/backing up all my household PCs & Macs? Are there any dedicated Webistes on MS Home Server? I found 1 but they seem to rave about Home Server more than talk about how to make it better.

Thanks
 
Damit, Server 2008 R2. Still get the server names confused. Because their's a new MS Server that my company is Beta Testing.

anyway

MS Home Server vs. Server 2008 R2
 
Is it doing anything besides serving files? If not, that server is way overkill. You could get by with a dual core atom or i3 easy, with much less ram.

As for WHS vs w2k8, if you aren't running raid then whs would probably be easier. Otherwise WHS is just w2k3 with remote management software, and uses all drives connected as a single storage pool. Its made to make it very easy for home users to backup/store their files.
 
With a setup like that, I'd be using virtualization and running a lot of different servers.

I have an Athlon II x4 box with 8 GBs running 2k8 r2 as a hyper-v host for the following:

1 WHS with 1200 MB and 1 core, with 4 direct mapped 2 TB drives (backs up my 3 media PCs, my primary workstation, and a Windows 7 VM running on my wife's Mac as well as being my primary data storage repository)

1 2k8R2 AD/DHCP/DNS box with 800 MB and 1 core

1 Windows 7 HP x64 box with 1124 MB and 3 cores assigned connected to an HD Homerun tuner that does all my HD recording and transcoding then moves stuff to the WHS for sharing to all my media PCs

1 2k8r2 box with 1 core and 1026 MB that runs email/web/vpn

1 Untangle box wth 1000 MB and 1 core assigned that handles all the Internet traffic for my stuff that is not directly Internet connected

All the stuff other than the WHS runs on a 1 TB drive, and the host OS and non-WHS VMs are backed up onto another 1 TB drive.

That leaves me with enough capacity for playing around with a couple of other VMs for whatever I feel like playing with at the moment.
 
Speedo68 said:
Hey Guys,

I have a pressing need to setup a new Storage Server for home use. I currently have a couple of NAS at the house that are filling up. Yeah, I am up to 5TB of storage. Music and photos mostly. Yeah, that much music, record XM radio like a maniac.

Anyway, I want to build a small server to help manage my files. I really like my QNAP NAS's. But want something that's more versitale. I have a setup already to go. But wanting to ask a few questions before I pick.

MS Home Server - or - Server 2010

I will be running a quick Xeon 5667 or 5677 - 12gb RAM - and a SAS setup wtih 8 1TB 10000rpm drives. Got a server chassis with dual 650w psu's. So hardware is not a problem.

I know that Home Server is more for "ungeeky" households versus Server 2010. I have Technet so cost is not an issue. I just know that Home Server has some apps that are pretty cool.

Are their any add-on apps for reg Windows 7/Server 2010 that work like Home Server? How about sync/backing up all my household PCs & Macs? Are there any dedicated Webistes on MS Home Server? I found 1 but they seem to rave about Home Server more than talk about how to make it better.

Thanks
Click to expand...

With your technet account, you can get a lot of the same type of functionality, but it's involves a lot of effort and likely, more than one system.

Filesharing, remote access can be accomplished with Win2k8, But you won't get a nice homeserver.com address and a nice single point web portal entrance to your network. With mutliple NICs you can create a VPN into your network and manually access any thing you want. It's just not in one easy to access package like WHS is.

For backup and recovery, of course W2K8 has shadow copy. You can also use Technet to get a copy of MS DPM (Data Protection Management). It's has some similar function to WHS, but is MUCH more complex. I don't think it has Mac support though.

Take a look at Aurora as well. It's kind of a mix between Vail and SBS. You get the online access, the drive extender stuff, Domain support, etc. You just don't get the nice Web Based media streaming that Vail offers.

What you won't get with W2k8 will be:
-The media stuff, which you can get similar with twonky.
-The Homeserver.com address
-A prebuilt web interface for remote access
-Drive extender

I've played around with all options (Win2k8, Vail, Aurora) extensively. I've settled down on Vail for the mixture of features and ease of use.

Win2k8 was interesting to set up and get working with DPM, but in the end, it's much more work than you need to deal with.

Download the Beta to Vail and see if you like it. I think it's well worth taking a look at. The only downside atm is that it is a BETA, so I will have to re-install once it goes live. At home, I have my Primary Desktop and another PC still using WHS v1, and I have this laptop and my Media Center using Vail.

WHS v1 has been practically seamless for me. It's been rock solid for 2 years backing up my data everynight, and giving me remote access. I've been running Vail since it's first Beta release, and the current version has been terrific for me. I'm using that version to conect remotely to my network and access files and media and back up those machines.
 
Ditto on WHS being a solid setup. I have used it for a couple of years (one year with a homebrew machine made up of extra/old parts and one year with an Acer Aspire WHS box). I have restored my main PC twice (once from a drive failure and the second time from a virus) and was back up and running in no time. I use the server to store music, movies and files. I can access them both internally and externally. MS gives you a xxxxx.homeserver.com address for accessing your box from the internet.

If you can hold your horses a bit, I think WHS v2 (with 64bit support) should be coming out in the next 6 months (fingers crossed). It's based on Server 2008 (they use a mature server app to insure compatibility and reduce issues) and has added some user requested features.

Do you plan on having the server do some heavy work? You are talking about some serious hardware. If you plan to rip movies with the server or have it run some serious programs, then I can see that hardware. However, if you just want a server that stores your data and backs up your computers, then I would suggest a prefab box. I dropped from about 150W to less than 40W by moving to the Acer Aspire box from my homebrew rig. It's only set up for 4 hard drives (comes with a 1TB drive with OS on it) but you can use the ESATA connection on back to add a second storage unit with up to 8 more drives. It can stream highdef movies no problems. I have a gigabit lan with intel NICs in my PCs and on large files I can get transfer rates up to 70MB/s which is pretty close to the limit on the drives I use.

A great site for info on WHS and the add-ins is wegotserved.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top