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Forgive me if these questions are stupid but I have absolutely no experience with servers, so be kind to me.
Given that a major reason for having a server is to automate backups, and said backing up can be scheduled. What happens if the computers that are to be backed up are off or asleep with the Wake on LAN function turned off at the scheduled time?
Does the server perform the backup when the formerly sleeping computer is next turned on?
If so does the backing up, with its attendant disk, activity affect the performance of the computer for the period of time the backup takes? If so in what way? Would you be able to watch an avi or recorded TV program stored on the server with no ill effects, given the network is a gigabit LAN?
The reason I ask this is that one of the things that people are advised to do with their MCE’s is to turn off the Wake on LAN function so that the machine doesn’t keep waking up when the network refreshes.
With WHS, if the machine is in suspend or hibernate it will wake to do the backup. This is done by the client software, so WOL does not need to ne enabled. If the machine is shutdown it will not back up.
The performance hit is not that great, no worse than having a virus scan running. I haven't tried watching sommething stream over a gigbit network while a network back up is running, but I don't think the back up will kill it.
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Having just re-read Paul Thurrot's preview of WHS I have another question.
Can WHS be used to share a printer? Paul Thurrot talks about the HP WHS being able to do so but also says that HP are extending the usefullness of the program, so it is unclear if this is a core ability of WHS or one HP added.
Craig - I believe that it's a planned option for early 2008:
"Microsoft’s current plan is to provided two releases a year on a major/minor cycle, with the first minor release coming some time in early 2008. Among the features they’re considering adding is full-featured print server support - something that’s more difficult than expected due to printer manufacturers’ insistence on distributing drivers with 200MB management suites that ask you whether you want to buy more ink every time you start up."
As for right now, it would seem that it's probably doable as long as your printer/MFD has Windows Server 2003 compliant drivers.
Mike
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Having just re-read Paul Thurrot's preview of WHS I have another question.
Can WHS be used to share a printer? Paul Thurrot talks about the HP WHS being able to do so but also says that HP are extending the usefullness of the program, so it is unclear if this is a core ability of WHS or one HP added.
Craig.
Hi Craig
I don't think anyone is willing to issue a blanket statement around WHS working as a print server because it has dependencies on your printer having a Windows Server 2003 driver available. This could be a problem for quite a few of the printers out there in consumerland. The printer drivers would also need to be added via the TS session rather than through the WHS console, which isn't very user friendly.
It would be smart for HP to include support for a few of the printers they would like to sell into this space, but highly doubtful they would extend to older printers and non-HP printers.
i.
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Media Center: Zalman HD160 Black | Phenom 9600 | 4 GB RAM | 3 x 250GB HDD | Radeon 2600XT | Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe/Wi-Fi | Pioneer PDP-LX808A
WHS:Intel C2D4300 | Intel 975BX | 2GB RAM | 8 x 500GB HDD | Radeon 2400Pro
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Thanks for the info, if I ever get round to building a WHS I will try and see if the XP drivers work.
Have hit a snag with my plans, was intending to upgrade my office/home computer to an Intel Q6600 rig (as the AMD quad is NBG by comparrison) and use my existing office/home computer with a new Lian-Li PC-71B case etc, but have discovered that the chipset, nVidea nForce4, on the mobo, a Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-P, does not have server drivers available. So looks like I will have to spend more money on a new MOBO and CPU.
One more question for you gurus.
As WHS treats all drives added to it as one extended drive, does this mean that the performance of the drives is downgraded to the slowest, that is if you have a mixture of IDE, SATA and SATAII/SATA300 drives are they all operating at PATA transfer rates?
Craig,
What is your reason for building WHS?
File sharing - you can do it with XP
Print sharing - you can do it with XP
Backup - you can do it with XP and some 3rd party software, which is always better then M$
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Craig,
What is your reason for building WHS?
File sharing - you can do it with XP
Print sharing - you can do it with XP
Backup - you can do it with XP and some 3rd party software, which is always better then M$
There is some truth in what you say Vlad, but methinks you miss the point.
WHS is easily expandable, just add an extra disk into the array, no need to remap drives, shift data around, etc, the OS takes care of all that.
If a drive fails you don't lose data, you just replace the drive. If your BIOS supports hot-swap yu don't even have down-time due to drive failure. And all without the admin overhead of RAID solutions.
The backup is dead easy to configure, reliable and smart. It will not back up the same file twice. For example, if you have two XP PCs on the network being backed up, most of the system files will be identical on both PCs. WHS will back up the first PC completely, then when it does the second, instead of backing up those same files again (which is what most backup software will do) it just notes that the previously backed up files apply to both PCs. This can sav a lot of space.
Similarly, when it backs up again the next day, it just tags unchanged files as belonging to both bcakups. Now if you restore you don't have to restore from the last full then add the incrementals, just restore the last backup and you get the latesy version of everything. Want to roll back? Just restore from an earlier backup version. Click and your away.
If you want just one or two files back it's just open the backup from whatever date you want the file back from and drag and drop the file. Easy.
WHS is not much more expensive than another copy of XP and when you add the cost of a decent backup software solution, it may even be cheaper. Data security is better and admin is reduced. It is very well done. I'm no M$ flag waver, they do a lot of stupid things, but WHS isn't one of them.
I ran it for a couple of months on test, it never missed a beat and I couldn't get it to lose data even when pulling disks out while the system was running. Can't do that on XP.
