Windows Home Server in depth review!

Jason — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 21:39:11 GMT

When Microsoft announced Windows Home Server earlier this year, it was greeted with a mixture of curious disdain and eagerness. Some questioned what the product offered over existing solutions, while others welcomed it with open arms. It's at once hard to explain and easy to understand what Windows Home Server is, but it's worth getting to know the newest addition to the Windows family.

Over the years, we've cobbled together our own "home servers" using a variety of platforms and hacks to get the functionality we desired. Others have taken advantage of consumer-level storage devices such as Infrant's ReadyNAS or Data Robotics' Drobo to back up files and serve up media. These were haphazard at best, as it required piecing together both hardware and various software applications into a patchwork solution.

Windows Home Server is available through the following distribution channels:

As a complete hardware/software solution.
As OEM software for system builders.

Joe and Jane Public will likely walk into their local big-box electronics retailer and buy prebuilt machines that will have Windows Home Server already installed and configured for use. The test hardware we've used for this review is discussed in further detail later in this review, but for those of who want to roll your own, take a look at the Budget Box recommendations in our System Guides.

For those of you that were waiting on the OEM release, Microsoft is famously tight-lipped about system builder release dates and pricing, but several North American retailers have it in stock and ready to ship. As we noted, pricing has fluctuated as retailers look for the sweet spot, but it looks like our estimates of $150-200 weren't too far off the mark.

What Windows Home Server is

At first glance, Windows Home Server seems built to scratch an itch that doesn't exist. When Microsoft set out to make the business case for Windows Home Server, it quickly focused on a very specific target market: "Households with a broadband connection with 2 or more 'active' PCs that are sharing the internet connection." Additional research showed that on average, the majority of these households also had a digital camera, color printer, and a game console, but less than 20 percent reported feeling secure with their backup solution.

With Windows Home Server, Microsoft wants to simplify how your files and backups are stored. So far, so good, but what about the additional features: remote access, media sharing, etc.? Are they a tacked-on afterthought, or does Windows Home Server make everything play nicely together?

What Windows Home Server is not

If you're expecting something along the lines of Microsoft's enterprise products, then don't get your hopes up. In developing Windows Home Server, the team kept the scope lean and mean, instead allowing users to extend functionality by the use of add-ins. As a full-fledged media server, however, users coming from purpose-built platforms like Windows' Media Center Edition, SageTV, or MediaPortal will find Windows Home Server's feature set a little bare-boned.

Small businesses might salivate at the prospect of a ~$200 price tag for a storage and backup solution, but Windows Home Server is definitely targeted towards the consumer. The 10-user limit doesn't leave much room for growth, and its feature set pales in comparison to enterprise offerings like Windows Small Business Server. Those of you with LTO or DLT systems at home might not be content with Windows Home Server's backup methodologies, but for the majority of users, it should be more than adequate.

Computer backup and restore

Once your Home Server and client PCs are set up, backups will happen automatically, and you can restore a whole computer or an individual file or folder from any available backups. Backups occur daily, and you can select a time frame for backups to be made. The Connector will not initiate a backup if there is any activity—say, someone checking their e-mail or browsing the Web—on the client PC. However, the lack of wake-on-LAN means that Windows Home Server will only be able to back up computers that are already on or in sleep mode.

First used by Microsoft in Exchange Server, single-instance storage eliminates duplicated files and minimizes the size of Windows Home Server's backups by keeping only one copy of files used by multiple users or computers —a process Microsoft refers to as Single Instance Store. Here, it's as good as ever; for example, two computers that currently eat up 71GB of space total on both of their system drives are squeezed down into 54GB of backup files. In conjunction with Volume Shadow Services technology, which takes a point-in-time snapshot of a client PC, it's an efficient way to minimize the space requirements of computer backups. After the initial backup, Windows Home Server performs sector comparisons on what's changed and backs up the changes.

Bare-metal and individual file restores are initiated from the client PC. For individual files, you can select the desired backup to restore from, and Windows Home Server will begin unpacking the backup file. Once complete, you will be presented with an Explorer window and prompted to drag and drop the desired files to your computer's hard drive.

A dialog box gives you a progress meter when opening a backup

For a complete restore, Windows Home Server provides a Restore CD that allows you to boot up a computer and restore a full backup, including the operating system. Because this restore process will wipe any existing data on the client PC's hard drive, it's to be used with caution, but for power users who are looking for an easy way to image and restore machines, this feature is among one of Windows Home Server's most attractive.

There are, unfortunately, a few issues with Windows Home Server's backup functionalities. For one, only computers running Windows XP SP2 or Vista x86 can be backed up, leaving older versions of Windows and x64 out in the cold. The developers have commented that the lack of time to develop compatible backup and restore drivers is the reason behind the lack of an x64 Connector, and there is currently no word on when this functionality might become available.

There are some caveats to the Backup service. For one, WHS is going to assume that it can back up all PCs connected to it, but it does fail if it runs out of space. Backup and restoration can also be CPU- and network-intensive. As a test, an initial backup of 20GB over 802.11g took approximately an hour and a half, while 35GB over a 100Mbps Ethernet link took a little over an hour. CPU usage occasionally spiked to 100 percent, but it's clear that the bottleneck lay with the network. If you're doing a full restore, it's highly recommended that you do it over a wired connection. The initial backup is especially intensive, especially if the client PC is running Windows XP. This isn't anything out of the ordinary to those of us used to seeing the impact of a disk-to-disk backup.

Sharing and storage

Along with computer backups, Windows Home Server also features robust file sharing and server storage options. Although Windows Home Server is built on the same codebase as Windows Server 2003 and includes most of the same capabilities, Windows Home Server does have additional capabilities, such as data redundancy and expandable storage, which are handled by the OS.

Microsoft calls the file-based replication system running behind the scenes Windows Home Server Drive Extender, and it allows you to add drives of any size or type to your storage pool. By selecting whether or not to replicate content in a particular folder, you can also ensure multi-drive redundancy. Because the OS handles drive management, Microsoft recommends not installing Windows Home Server on a RAID array and not adding a RAID array to your storage pool.

As a test, we hooked up Data Robotic's Drobo to our Opteron test box to see how Windows Home Server and the Drive Extender would react. While Drobo can interface with WHS as a standard USB2 device, attempting to add the Drobo drives into the main storage pool was unsuccessful. We didn't test this issue on Infrant's ReadyNAS, but we would strongly suggest you heed Microsoft's warning about avoiding RAID configurations on a Windows Home Server system.

Drive Extender also performs the function of balancing storage across multiple drives. When files are copied to your Home Server, by default they are first placed on the system drive. Windows Home Server then determines where and how these files can be distributed across the storage pool and moves files off to the other drives. It's why Microsoft recommends that you install Windows Home Server onto your largest drive, as the space remaining after the 20GB system partition is created is used as a landing zone for your storage pool.

Adding and removing drives to the storage pool can be managed from the Connector. Keep in mind that any data on a drive being added to the storage pool will be erased when the drive is formatted. If, like us, you need to move data off of a drive before adding it to the pool, you might find yourself playing musical chairs with your drives. The drive removal process is painless, although you will first have to wait for Windows Home Server to move files off of the drive to be removed.

Upon setup, Windows Home Server creates predefined folder shares—Music, Photos, Public, Software, and Videos—that users with accounts will be able to access. Along with these public folders, Windows Home Server also creates a shared folder for each account. These folders are shared using Samba, so other platforms can access content on your Home Server. Folder permissions are a simplification of Windows access control lists, instead following a Unix-like read-write/read/none model. Unfortunately, these permissions are, by default, set at the shared-folder level; subfolders inherit the permissions of their parent folders, although it is possible to change them outside of Windows Home Server.

Because Windows Home Server uses both Windows Media Connect 2.0 and DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) to share media, you can stream content to a variety of devices. The lack of integration between Windows Home Server and the various Media Center Editions will doubtless disappoint those of you looking to consolidate your boxes, but some enthusiasts are already hard at work integrating MCE into Windows Home Server.

The Connector

In order to facilitate remote administration, Windows Home Server comes with a client application—officially called the Windows Home Server Console—but colloquially known as the Connector. Installing the Connector on your client PCs places an icon in your system that alerts you to your Home Server's health. It also creates a shortcut on your desktop to the shared folders on your Home Server, as well as adds the folders to your Network Places.

The Connector login screen

When you double-click the Windows Home Server icon in your PC's system tray, you'll be prompted to enter your Home Server's password. From this screen, you can also reset a recalcitrant Home Console. It's a good idea to untick the "Remember the Windows Home Server password" check box from the Options menu on this screen to keep your Home Server secure, as the Connector serves as the administrator—not the end-user—interface with the Home Server.

The main Connector screen divides Home Server administration tasks into four specific areas. If there are any users accessing the Home Server remotely, their user name appears in the bottom left-hand area of the status bar. This area also shows you the status of any storage balancing on the server.

The Computers & Backup screen (click for full size)

If you have set up the Connector on a PC, it will show up on the Computers & Backup screen. From here, you can view the backup status of all the connected PCs on your network, configure the backup schedule and options for a selected PC, or choose to remove PCs from the list.

When first accessed, the Connector configuration wizard requests to sync the client computer user name and password with the Home Server. Some that might not have a password associated with their login on their PCs might be annoyed by this, but it's actually an important step. When we attempted to connect to Windows Home Server without login/password synchronization between systems, we occasionally encountered trouble actually accessing folders or data via the Connector.

The View Backups pop-up menu gives you more detail about the available backups for the selected PC, and you have the option of managing retention times for each specific backup or allowing Home Server to use your presets. The option to view and restore from a specific backup file is also available from this screen.

The User Accounts screen (click for full size)

Managing users and permissions for Windows Home Server is done from the User Accounts screen. From here, you can view and manage all user accounts.

When adding a new account, Windows Home Server will prompt you to enter a user name and password and then select permissions for each of the available shared folders. The Home Server then automatically creates a folder for the user that only they will be able to access. If a particular folder is associated with a user to be deleted, you will also be asked if you would like to delete it along with the account.

The Properties pop-up menu allows you to enable or disable Remote Access for that account, change the user password, reset Shared Folder permissions, or disable the account.

You can see what folders are publicly available from the Shared Folders screen
(click for full size)

The Shared Folders screen allows you to manage the folders that have been made available on your network; personal folders added during the user creation process are also listed on this screen.

You can also view the duplication status and used space for each folder from this screen. If, like us, you have some file paths and names that go over the 260-character limit, the shared folder containing the offending file will turn an appropriate shade of cautionary yellow to let you know that duplication is failing due to an overlong file name. This, however, can be misleading, as despite the fact that duplication was turned off for the specific folder, the error message kept popping up anyway. It's a good idea to keep your file names in check, but it would be nice if Windows Home Server didn't incorrectly blame the error on duplication.

Adding or deleting shared folders is easily done via the Connector, as well as changing user permissions and selecting folder duplication options. The latter is important as the Windows Home Server storage pool does not natively provide data protection by default. Because of this, Windows Home Server allows you to select folders that you want duplicated across multiple drives.

We like pie—pie charts, that is (click for full size)

The Server Storage screen displays all the hard drives attached to your Home Server. It seems to limit itself to proper hard drives; on our Athlon 64 test box, we had a flash drive and a DVD-ROM drive all connected via USB to the Home Server, but they don't show up on this screen. An external hard drive, however, does get listed on this screen when plugged in.

Windows Home Server categorizes hard drives as storage or non-storage, and they are listed accordingly on this screen. Annoyingly, you aren't given much in the way of options besides adding a new drive, repairing a failing drive, or removing a hard drive from the storage pool. A little more information about each drive, á la Logical Disk Manager, would have been useful. Although the hard drive containing the system partition is helpfully designated with the Windows flag, you're seemingly on your own when it comes to recognizing the drives you've got in your system.

We're big fans of the pie chart showing the total size of your storage pool and how space is being used. The only static number will be the 20GB that your system partition takes up by default; the amount of space being used by Shared Folders, any folders being duplicated, PC backups, and any remaining free space are displayed dynamically on the pie chart.

The Home Network Health screen notifies you of any problems with your Home Server (click for full size)

If there are any issues with your Home Server, additional information about the problem is displayed on the Home Network Health screen. Like the system tray icon, the shield-shaped icon changes color (green, yellow, or red) depending on the severity of the issue; blue denotes that a backup is currently in progress. If any client PCs are running Vista, the Home Network Health screen will also display any problems detected by Security Center.

The Windows Home Server Settings screen provides you with a variety of administrative options (click for full size)

The Connector allows you to configure your Home Server's additional functions and features from the Windows Home Server Settings screen. From here, you can schedule and manage backups, reset the Home Server password and select a password policy for user accounts, enable or disable Media Library Sharing, set up Remote Access connectivity, install add-ins, and manage general Windows Home Server options.

Remote Access

One of the more useful features of Windows Home Server is its Remote Access capabilities. If you have enabled Web Site Connectivity and correctly set it up, you can access your Home Server over the web. A setup wizard walks you through setting up a subdomain at homeserver.com, configures your router, and helps you select basic options for your Home Server site.

The Remote Access login screen

Connecting to your Home Server URL over port 80 (http://) will display the default Home Server home page; port 443 (https://) using Internet Explorer is the only way you will be able to use Remote Access.

Once logged in, you have the option of logging in remotely to the PCs on
your network or browsing your shared folders (click for full size)

Remote Access will only allow you to log in remotely to your PCs and Home Server. The user permissions associated with each specific account carry over to Remote Access as well.

By selecting an available PC, you can use Remote Desktop to access it directly
(click for full size)

Remotely logging into a PC on your home network can be initiated using the web interface. You can also remotely administer your Home Server via the Remote Access interface, but first you'll need to add your Home Server's URL to your browser's Trusted Zones. For those of us who serve as tech support for our extended family, this ability to manage Home Servers via the web is an incredibly useful feature.

The Shared Folders tab allows you to browse the folders you have access to
(click for full size)

Because Windows Search indexes all the content in your shared folders, it is easy to locate files using the web interface. This is useful if you're on a less-than-speedy connection and need to browse to a specific location or file quickly.

Remote Access allows you to browse and manage your Shared Folder content easily
(click for full size)

From the Shared Folders tab, you can rename or delete files and folders, or you can upload or download files. If you select multiple files for download, Home Server will automatically zip them up for you first. If you're tired of explaining how to use FTP to your great-aunt Ruth, the web interface makes it easy to share files.

The SDK

One of the major selling points of Windows Home Server is its easy-to-use software development kit (SDK). Using either Visual Studio 2005 or the freely available Visual C# 2005 Express Edition, developers have access to multiple options when creating a Windows Home Server add-in.

The first option is to extend Windows Home Server itself. By adding a reference to the Microsoft.HomeServer.SDK.Interop.v1.dll assembly and implementing one of the given interfaces, code can be written to manipulate several areas of the server including folders, notifications, users, and even backup settings. The WHSInfo class provides access to properties of the server such as drive information and networking settings. For developers interested in creating software to control the server, the second option—extending the Windows Home Server Connector—is the route of choice. HomeServerExt.dll provides all the necessary interfaces for adding functionality to the Connector, enabling the developer to add tabs, settings, and web access to the Connector.

One of the more appealing aspects of Windows Home Server development is the ability to create ASP.NET web applications that are hosted on the server. Because the server runs IIS, it can host any ASP.NET application. Though that may not seem like a big deal, the bigger picture is that applications can easily be created for an entire household's use. Sure, ASP.NET applications could be hosted on Windows XP, but IIS 5 seems clunky compared to IIS 6. Hopefully when a future version of Windows Home Server is built using the Windows Server 2008 codebase, users will be able to use to IIS 7 and reap all the extensible benefits that it offers.

In general, Microsoft's Windows Home Server SDK documentation should be easy to use for anyone who is familiar with Microsoft's Software Development Network resources. The biggest drawback to Windows Home Server development is that the number of examples on the Web are fairly limited, especially ones for advanced software engineers. Some of the documentation also seems lacking compared to what's available for core .NET classes. Nevertheless, Microsoft provides several basic examples for extending your Home Server and the Connector, all of which can be found as part of the SDK.

It's also worth noting that the community surrounding Windows Home Server add-in development is growing rapidly. Many add-ins are available free of charge and can be found at the We Got Served web site. Microsoft has also attempted to spur the growth of the community by hosting the Code2Fame Challenge, which pushed developers to create the coolest, most useful add-in possible. First prize was awarded to Andrew Grant for Whiist, who wrote an add-in allowing users to host multiple web pages and photos on WHS.

Testing platforms and configurations

Windows Home Server's system requirements can be described as "modest," and the documentation acknowledges that do-it-yourselfers are likely to repurpose old hardware to put together their own systems. A 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a 70GB hard drive, and a NIC are the minimum requirements, although you will need a display, a DVD drive, and a keyboard/mouse in order to complete installation.

Enthusiast builders will likely put together their own Home Servers, and so two of our test beds were put together using a combination of old parts scavenged from our hardware closet along with some new additions, thanks to some retail therapy.

ECS GeForce6100SM-M AM2 GeForce microATX motherboard
AMD Sempron 64 Manila 1.6GHz Socket AM2 CPU
2 x 1GB Wintec DDR2 800 SDRAM
Syba 4-port SATA controller card
2 x Western Digital WD5000AAKS 500GB hard drives
1 x Western Digital WD7500AAKS 750GB hard drive
1 x Seagate ST3750640AS 750GB hard drive
nForce4 Networking controller

This build isn't top of the line by any means, but it was enough to keep Windows Home Server humming along happily.

We also tested Windows Home Server on an even older "legacy" system to observe whether or not six- to seven-year-old hardware was capable of handling the task.

DFI AK76 motherboard
Athlon Thunderbird 1.2 Ghz
1.25GB RAM
A collection of near dead drives:
- 7200rpm 75GB IBM Deskstar ATA100
- 7200rpm 120GB Maxtor ATA133
- 7200rpm 160GB Maxtor ATA133
- 7200rpm 40GB Maxtor FW400
Intel DesktopMT Gigabit adaptor

We also installed Windows Home Server on a PC with more current hardware. Obviously, this testbed was well beyond the requirements of the OS, but it allowed us to see how Windows Home Server would perform on more powerful hardware.

Tyan S2895 motherboard
2x AMD Opteron 256
2.75GB RAM
Tyan S2895
nForce4 Networking controller
1x NVIDIA 7800GTX
1x Seagate 7200.7 120GB drive
1x Seagate 7200.10 320GB drive
1x Seagate 7200.9 500GB drive

On all three builds, an issue that we were continually disappointed with was the lack of initial driver support, which added steps to the installation process. The Tyan S2895 isn't a new board—it came out in 2005—and it would have been nice to see at least some drivers pre-loaded. The RAID card in our 1.6GHz Sempron testbed, which is based on a common Silicon Image chipset, also required manual driver installation during initial setup. Obviously this isn't an issue that anyone buying a prebuilt system would have to deal with, but for the DIY crowd, we recommend having a CD or flash key with all of your motherboard drivers handy or slipstreaming drivers into a new installation DVD.

Benchmarks and performance

All tests were run using our 1.2GHz Athlon system. Although obviously not the top-of-the-line system available, testing this configuration allowed us to see whether WHS could perform on legacy hardware. Because Windows Home Server is based on Windows 2003 SP2, its performance characteristics should be similar to its predecessor. In order to test and verify this, we assembled a virtual cornucopia of machines to test these claims.

In order to benchmark performance, we utilized a 4GB DV file to copy the files to and from the Home Server. Results were then broken up into two different scores. The first score is the initial 500MB before the Windows Home Server began to balance storage, which we'll explain after the benchmark results. The second number is the real-time number of the file transfer when Windows Home Server began to balancing storage.

We tested file copy speeds to Windows Home Server using the following clients, configuration, and hardware:

Athlon 64 3800+ workstation with 2GB of PC5300 RAM and Vista
- 160GB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA
Mac Mini 1.5GHz (Yonah) with 2GB of PC3500 RAM and OS 10.4.10
- 60GB 5400 RPM 2.5" SATA
Athlon 64 3800+ with 2GB of PC3200 RAM and Gentoo Linux 2.6.2.0
- Custom RAID50
Thinkpad X41 with 1.5GHz Centrino, 1GB of DDR4200 and an OS
- 40GB 1.8" 4200RPM SATA

The key to understanding the significant difference in these figures is remembering that Windows Home Server does a lot of tricks to disguise that there are multiple drives. Essentially, when you begin writing to the server, you are writing to the first drive. Windows Home Server tries to aggressively maintain the maximum amount of free space as possible on this first drive. This is where Windows Home Server's Balancing Storage act comes into play. (Note that users who only have one physical drive installed in their Home Server will not see this functionality in action.) Essentially, balancing storage is the act of moving the new data away from the primary drive to any of the additional drives that have been added to the server. During our testing, we would see initially great performance until, at some random spot in the copy process, it would appear to grind to a halt. Now we realize we used an extreme case with our 4GB file copy, but is it too much to ask for Windows Home Server to wait for an idle time to balance storage?

Read performance from the Windows Home Server, as we expected, was fast. Each PC was able to maintain the performance level listed above in the first set of numbers. The Home Server was also able to provide a streaming interface that utilizes Windows Media Connect. Streaming music and video to the Xbox 360 and a laptop running Vista simultaneously did not exhibit any unusually high CPU usage.

Restoring data via WHS following drive failure, or trouble in "antiquated" paradise

We made comments in our configuration section that related our use of "antiquated" hardware. Realizing that WHS doesn't really have a form of automatic redundancy with its balancing storage system, we wanted to force the issue. Lo and behold, one of the drives on our 1.2GHz Athlon test bed obliged us and failed on its own.

Once this occurred, we became a tad confused with Windows Home Server. In the Connector, it showed all drives as being fine; however, the backup service had stalled. As Kurt is a professional Windows system administrator by trade, he knew where to look to see what the issue was, but we wanted to use the product as it was intended. He caved and took a peek at the Event Viewer. Apparently, the drive was suffering from continuous bad-sector errors. This in turn caused backups to fail. We were shocked that Windows Home Server didn't at least scrub the Event Viewer for potential drive-related issues.

This brings us to our next gripe: drive removal. Now that Kurt knew there was a failed drive, he decided to remove it using the WHS console. After thinking for a while, Windows Home Server returned a prompt stating that we would lose the backups and some files stored on the 1.2GHz Athlon test bed. Oddly enough, it didn't tell us which files were in jeopardy of being lost, and we think a listing would be nice at this point. At least then you could prepare or attempt to manually copy the files off.

Mac/Linux support

At this point in time, the only way Mac and Linux works with Windows Home Server is by using Samba to access folder shares. There's no word on whether or not the Connector will be ported to these OSes, but we wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. It has, however, been intimated by the developers that the upcoming Time Machine feature on Mac OS X Leopard will be able to use Windows Home Server as a back-end store. Will this simply save Time Machine backups to shared folders using Samba or is there more behind the scenes? We won't know for sure until Leopard comes out later this year.

General performance

In common use (streaming music and video, accessing content on shared folders, etc.), Windows Home Server works with nary a hiccup, but its ability to perform is highly dependent on your hardware and network. On our Athlon 64 test bed, we were able to stream high-definition WMV to an Xbox 360, initiate a computer backup, and transfer several hundred MB of photos to shared folders without experiencing any slowdowns.

Any Windows Home Server-specific performance issues are usually attributed to the Drive Extender Migrator Service, which runs in the background. If storage is being balanced, the CPU may occasionally spike high, but it's really the disk activity that affects performance.

Conclusion

It's not an easy question to answer, but it's worth asking: is Windows Home Server worth it?

If you're an enthusiast or early adopter with old hardware lying around the house, then building your own box means that you'll only be out the cost of the OS, provided you don't need to purchase additional parts. Some might balk at the $170-190 price, so if you're looking for a free or cheaper alternative, there are already open-source clones gearing up for the same space. (Ubuntu Home Server, anyone?)

For folks who are already using a NAS to host backups and stream media, Windows Home Server might be a tougher sell. And what if you're a multiple-PC household and can't tell a soldering iron from a meat thermometer? Is a $599+ preconfigured Windows Home Server something you really need?

That depends. We believe that the ease of use in creating and managing computer backups is an excellent alternative to a software program combined with an external hard drive or NAS, and the ability to manage files and users from a client PC or via the web interface is a selling point. File sharing and storage are kept to the basics, and developers are already hard at work developing additional functionality using the SDK.

It's disappointing, however, for those of us who want slightly finer control over our servers. Although the Connector and Remote Access are easy to use, the choices presented via these interfaces have been simplified for a consumer audience. The lack of x64 support and integration with Media Center will also frustrate some users, but Windows Home Server gets a surprising lot right for its first time.

We would still like to see some more integration with some of Microsoft's other products (Media Center, anyone?). Performance was within reason (ignoring the aggressive storage balancing), and the expandability of this server OS gives it a lot of potential. Performance-wise, Windows does perform well on antiquated hardware (read: six years old), so all of you with P3 or older Athlon-based systems can give those machines a new lease on life as a Home Server.

Perhaps the most impressive "feature" of Windows Home Server is that it's a product that gives the term "digital hub" real meaning for the first time. While WHS isn't perfect, it's not hard to imagine a future version of the OS offering both a wider range of features and increased connectivity with a variety of additional devices. Windows Home Server is only the first step towards a true "digital hub," but it's great to finally see a product where the term actually has some genuine meaning behind it.

What we'd like to see in 2.0

Xbox 360 backups: Got the red ring of death on your 360? Upgrading from a Core/Premium and bemoaning the lack of a transfer cable as an Elite pack-in? The ability to back up save files and Xbox Live Marketplace content to Windows Home Server would provide added peace of mind for those of us with hard-fought game saves and Xbox Live downloads.
Centralized antivirus and update management: You're longing for WSUS to come to Windows Home Server too, aren't you? While the integration with Vista's Security Center is great, extending this protection to PCs running XP would be useful as well. Third-party software developers, however, are already hard at work testing server-client solutions.
Media Center integration: Currently, the basic Media Sharing functionality built into Windows Home Server is enough to share music, photos, and WMV-encoded videos to any extenders you might also have on your network, but Home Server users coming from fuller-featured media management platforms will definitely find themselves wanting more.
64-bit Connector: With more and more machines running Vista 64-bit, this might aggravate some Windows Home Server early adopters.

Pros:

Minimal hardware requirements mean you can take older hardware and get started right away.
The Connector and Remote Access make it easy to administer your Home Server remotely.
The ability to use add-ins to extend the functionality of Windows Home Server.

Cons:

No 64-bit Connector.
The administrative interface is sometimes too simplistic.
Bare-bones media sharing and streaming capabilities.

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