Chris Lanier's Blog

Nope. I'm pretty happy with my Vista Ultimate which runs on my server and actually runs my MediaCenter.

Home Server is a terrific product. People are complaining that it doesn't do more Media Center stuff, but that's not really its market. It's more like a NAS device on steroids... pooled storage, automated backups of you desktops, network health monitoring, etc. I beta tested it and will definitely be using it in its final form.

I was skeptical when I started my beta testing but I've been won over by it. The first time I rebuilt a dead HD across the network, I was hooked. Version 2 or 3 may be a little more interesting, but I think the initial release will be worth it.

Any clues to the price of an OEM license?

I'm warming up to it to this thing.

Yes I intend to buy it and my company intends to build them. Great product and will only get better!

Depends, one of the things I like about WHS is that it's designed to be run headless, yet a lot of the cases out there are more like mini full PC's, even a lot of the Shuttle machines.

What I'd really love is for a new generation of "headless" cases to come out that actually look sleek and sexy, not like aluminum boxes or recycled T3 props.  If affordable, stylish and small cases can be had then I'll be first in line to get one and build me out a few WHS machines for my families.

Honestly my perfect machine wouldn't even have an internal HD, it would just have say 8 to 10GB of flash memory for the OS and 4 to 8 USB 2.0 slots, an ethernet cable, power and that's it.

I've actually been very impressed with HP's case design lately, their latest slim model and the forth coming WHS cases are pretty sexy.  Call me shallow but I want my machines to look as good on the outside as the well as they perform on the inside.  And by *stylish* I don't mean these hideous LED gaming rigs with their poor tribal designs.

I will likely build one for my home, but the parents and everyone else I play tech support for will be getting OEM's. I've been using WHS at home for awhile now, and think it has become pretty solid. Really like the Velocity Micro WHS design.

Yes, I will build one. Actually, I will convert the box that the beta runs on. I also expect to build boxes to sell to my clients.

I think this is best product that Microsoft has created in the past 5 years. Vista is a dog with warts aplenty, but WHS sings.

When they add MCE w DCT support I will.  I hate running MCE on my desktop, would much rather have that functionality in a server appliance.

It seems MSFT could have an opportunity to use WHS as a "hook" in the household to keep people standardized on Windows.  As such I could see this being a pretty cheap piece of software (like < $99).  Think it's possible?

I wonder how it would perform running virtualized on an MCE machine.  The big problem I have with this thing is the idea of adding another "always on" machine in the house.

Nope - I am currently running Windows Server 2008 beta around my home network.

If WHS had Media Center Server support acting as a farm of tuners to multiple softsled based machines then it may have a place in the network but in it's current incarnation it won't be talking any room up in the rack ;-)

I'll definitely be building my own WHS. Actually I've been in the Beta since it was still closed/private and I'll be "upgrading" my existing WHS to the OEM release when it becomes available.

If the price is affordable I'll probably pick up an retail WHS box for my in-laws too.

One thing that I also think is overlooked is the value of WHS to small business. Many of my smaller clients currently have a server in place that is only used as a fileserver. Imagine replacing that with the lower cost WHS with automated desktop backups and pooled storage. It only allows 10 computers to connect for backup, but that is fine for dentists, small real estate offices, etc. If Microsoft is not careful, they could end up cannabalizing their "very small business" market.

Another question:  What are the system requirements for this thing?  Based on what I've seen so far, it seems that you shouldn't need much more than a lot of storage space.  CPU and RAM requirements should be fairly minimal, right?  You shouldn't even really need a video card, since it's headless?  

I mean, could I scrape together various spare parts to make one of these work?  

How about RAID, is that a requirement or is it only if you want redundancy?

Thanks.

Thanks for all the info Chris.  I'll probably build one of these if the price is right.  WHS looks better than I expected it to be.

Well, if they don't remove those stupid images of smily-happy-people from www.microsoft.com/.../default.mspx  I might not buy it.

Ive been running WHS for a few days now, and im loving it! got all the machines in the house backing up to it, and am in the process of transferring all my media to it so i can take out all the HDDS from our media centers.

As for the smiley happy people... the first thing i did was edit the images in the remote access webpages to remove them! :D

Loving the remote access features as well.

So many of you are knowledgeable, I have question.  I want to stream audio/video across my wireless network for use on a couple of flatscreens and a whole-house audio system.  Will this thing help or am I better off building a solution with networked drives?

I currently use Avennu for remote access and have USB drives for backup/storage.