ServeTheHome.com

One of the slickest things that one can do with a Windows Home Server machine is run it virtualized in a Hyper-V Virtual Machine. Windows Home Server frankly uses very little power itself leaving CPU cycles sitting idle. Of the CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs of companies with more than 10,000 employees I have talked to recently, all of them are looking at application virtualization to keep costs in the data center versus on user desktops. Perhaps I have heard the words “thin client” more times in the past six months from these folks than I have since the 1990′s. For Windows Home Server users, there is a really practical, and important thing that they can do to increase security at home, and that is use a dedicated, disposable, virtual machine for things such as banking (and for the more conservative online shopping). Read the full story

Oftentimes, users running file servers such as Windows 2008 Server R2, Windows Home Server, Linux variants (including Openfiler), OpenSolaris, FreeBSD (including FreeNAS), and so forth will require more storage than their server can physically store. One option is to add more servers to the SAN. Another option is to add more storage to an existing server. Adding a second (or third) enclosure for additional disks is a great option. This allows a server administrator to build a massive DAS storage system very inexpensively for applications like iSCSI, backup storage, media storage, virtual machine storage, and etc. Oftentimes, the ensuing research will lead IT professionals to JBOD DAS enclosures with SAS expanders built in.

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