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One of the knocks on Windows Home Server (WHS) is that it contains the word ‘Home’ in its name. If that issue has kept you from selling or installing WHS in businesses, then check out the news from HP — they have released WHS with a new name: HP StorageWorks X500 Data Vault!  The equipment is almost identical to their HP MediaSmart Server models, except with a faster processor, and SKU’s with larger (1TB and 1.5TB drives) in them. I install WHS in all my business client offices — even those with SBS servers. Are you?

For more than a year I have been promoting the use of Windows Home Server as a local backup solution in a Small Business Server (SBS2003/SBS2008) environment (per these two blogs: blog1 , blog2). I already have WHS installed at most of my SBS customer sites. It now seems as if Microsoft is now willing to say “Yes” — that using WHS to backup your workstations and servers is a viable and supported scenario!  Read more on Microsoft’s Technet site.

If you are a Microsoft Partner, there will be a 5W/50 webinar entitled “Business Opportunities with Windows Home Server – Updated with PowerPack 2 Content” today at noon (EDT) given by Grey Lancaster and Kevin Royalty. If you think WHS is only for homes, then you’re still thinking within the box! WHS is a perfect fit with SBS 2003/2008.

Talk about a deal too good to refuse! Acer recently came out with their WHS server, that competes straight up with the HP MediaSmart Server. For the rest of this post, I will refer to it as the ‘easyStore’. A week ago I stumbled on a deal through NCIX (USA) that was offering the easyStore for $399, with a 1TB drive and 2GB memory, and for a limited time was throwing in a second 1TB drive. I jumped at the chance. And it arrived by FedEx this afternoon. Within 30 minutes I had it unboxed, powered up, installed the WHS connector to … Continue reading WHS and the Acer Aspire easyStore H340

Microsoft released Power Pack 2 for Windows Home Server today (KB 956587). This is a free update that offers several new features. It does require you to already have Power Pack 1 installed.

One of my mottos has always been: “You cannot have enough backup!”. So, I am always investigating and testing backup software. When Microsoft first releasd Windows Home Server (WHS), I knew that this was a product I would be testing. Well, tonight, it saved my bacon! My own SBS 2003 server that has been running for years experienced a serious hard drive failure. Fortunately I do use Raid-5 disk configuration. So I shut down the server, replaced the drive, fired up the server to rebuild the Raid, and then rebooted. But apparently something else was amiss, as Windows would not boot up properly, reporting … Continue reading SBS, WHS and Backup Software

I’ve been testing out the Windows 7 beta on one of my laptops this week. And following my own best practices, I made sure I installed the WHS connector on it and made several backups during my testing. So, yesterday I tried (unsuccessfully) to join the Win7 laptop to a SBS2008 domain. (Yes, I’m aware of my changes required on SBS 2008 to allow Windows 7 to join the domain via http://connect). But still, it failed. So, when I got home I wanted to restore my laptop to its state before my attempt to join it to a domain. Talk about wasting valuable time! First, … Continue reading WHS Restore CD and Realtek NIC

As most of you know, last week there were widespread reports of Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200.11 drives failing. Initially only the 1TB disk drives were thought to be the issie. But later it was determined that the problem also existed in some of their other 7200.11 drives. I know, as I got hit with an SBS 2008 server that had four 750GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives! Seagate has since come out with a free firmware upgrade and utility. The download is in an ISO format as you must create a bootable CD to run it. However, please note that this firmware utility will … Continue reading Experience with the Seagate disk drive fiasco

I had a situation today where I had to reformat & reconfigure the raid drives for an SBS 2008 server. That part went fine, and doing a bare-metal restore of the server from the scheduled SBS 2008 daily USB backup went flawlessly. After we brought the server back online, I attempted to do a new full backup, but the backup failed with the following error: Creation of the shared protection point timed out. Unknown error (0x81000101) A quick Internet search found KB 956136 (“If calls to VSS management interface API’s are made…”). Now, the title of this KB article may not sound like it is … Continue reading Backup fails after bare-metal restore (SBS 2008)

If using SBS 2008, one of the things you want to do is to install and run the SBS 2008 Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) on a regular basis. At my first SBS 2008 installation, BPA recenlty reported that my Sharepoint log file was larger than 1gb in size. Strange, I thought, since this customer had not even started using sharepoint. Beyond that, BPA did not offer any suggestions for resolving this issue. So, here are the instructions (from the SBS BPA team) on what to do: Step 1: start up command prompt in administrator mode. You do this by clicking on … Continue reading SBS 2008 and Sharepoint Log file