ServeTheHome.com

A quick note, AdminiMe 2012 for the original Windows Home Server (Windows Server 2003 based kernel) has been released. I have covered AdminiMe a few times (also here for an upgrade), and it is an add-on I use in my Windows Home Server. Here is an excerpt of the changes: Continue Reading

Microsoft’s Windows Home Server Vail platform has had a rough development cycle. First cheered for the public beta with a slew of new media features such as on-the-fly transcoding, the euphoria did not last. This fall, Microsoft announced that the popular and updated Drive Extender V2 technology would no longer be a part of the Vail platform.  Drive Extender V2 provided both enhanced data security alongside the ability to pool drives using a technology not all too dissimilar to RAID 10 (ed. this is a bit of a stretch, but it does stripe and mirror.) Today we have Windows Home Server 2011 and Small Business Server 2011 Essentials release candidates which is the next evolution of the Windows Home Server and Small Business Server platform, bringing the more stable 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 platform to the consumer and very small business market.

A lot has been discussed in the community about having to use RAID for storage. As someone who has been using RAID with WHS for more than two years, this is not an issue at all if you understand how disk technologies work. That is precisely why using RAID and GPT with Windows Home Server v2 was covered in April 2010 at ServeTheHome.com.

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To aspiring Windows Home Server (WHS) developers out there, ASoft (makers of AdminiMe and AutoExit) has released their WHS DevKit 2 Version 1.1. This version has more complete documentation including how to create an installer and support for Windows Home Server build 7659.

You can check out the new release here.

This video tutorial will show you how to install the Windows Home Server Connector Software without using the CD/DVD. As netbooks, usually without optical drives, flood the market, this is often the easiest way to install the connector software. For those using a motherboard such as the Supermicro X8SIL-F  or Supermicro X8ST3-F, with remote ISO image mounting at the motherboard level through IPMI 2.0.Also, for those that have lost the disk, this is much easier than searching Microsoft’s site for the download as the connector software already sits on your network!

Again, please thank my colleague new to WHS for reminding me about this video.

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Sometimes you may want to uninstall a drive that you have connected to your Windows Home Server. WHS makes this easy and this guide and video tutorial will take you through the necessary steps to remove a drive without losing data. I had a colleague ask me how to do this so I figured that I would update the guide for others seeking help.

Please note: If you are passing disks through to a Hyper-V virtual machine or a RAID controller, this guide only covers the WHS portion, not extracting the drive from the virtual machine or RAID array.

The video:

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As a quick update to the previous AdminiMe 2010 review, ASoft released an update to its popular AdminiMe 2010 Add-in.

It appears as though ASoft does take feedback very seriously as a bug/ quirky feature noted in the initial AdminiMe review, where drives were not displayed in completely sequential order if more than 10 drives are present has been corrected.

AdminiMe Storage Tab displaying disks out of order in old version

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Windows Home Server v1 (WHS) was limited to using 2TB Master Boot Record (MBR) partitions in its storage pool, but the public preview of Windows Home Server V2 codename VAIL is not. This guide will show one how to use GPT Raid volumes passed through Windows Server 2008 R2 running Hyper-V into WHS V2 Codename VAIL. (That sounded way more complex than it actually is).

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DuplicationInfo is a small Windows Home Server (WHS) add-in that allows one to see what Drive Extender is doing. More specifically, DuplicationInfo allows a user to map a specific file stored on the WHS to the drives being used.

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A few weeks ago I posted a quick guide to a command line method of shutting down a remote PC, using Remote Desktop. Today, a much better option, ASoft’s AutoExit. AutoExit is a great add-in for a Windows Home Server that consists of a simple add-in that runs on the WHS, and a client application that works on each individual PC.

To get the current AutoExit release candidate, please see ASoft’s Website here. The price is currently great insofar as it is free.  If you haven’t checked out ASoft’s AdminiMe already, see the ServeTheHome AdminiMe review here. It may be worth picking up the free version of AdminiMe or getting the full version while snagging AutoExit.

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