Products that are listed on this site with a logo have been tested with Microsoft Windows Server 2016, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows. Windows Home Server Wikipedia. Windows Home Server, code named Quattro, is a home serveroperating system from Microsoft. It was announced on 7 January 2. Consumer Electronics Show by Bill Gates,4released to manufacturing on 1. July 2. 00. 75 and officially released on 4 November 2. Windows Home Server is based on Windows Server 2. R2 and is intended to be a solution for homes with multiple connected PCs to offer file sharing, automated backups, print server, and remote access. Star Of Prometheus here. Power Pack 1 for Windows Home Server was released on 2. Hp Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 My Computer' title='Hp Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 My Computer' />Hp Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 UpdateJuly 2. Power Pack 2 was released on 2. March 2. 00. 9 and Power Pack 3 was released on 2. November 2. 00. 9. Windows Home Server 2. April 2. 01. 1. 8 Microsoft confirmed Windows Home Server 2. Windows Home Server product line. Featuresedit1. Allows a maximum of ten user accounts to be created on the server console and ten computers to have WHS connector installed, without any client access licenses. Centralized backup Allows backup of up to 1. PCs,1. 1 using Single instance storage technology to avoid multiple copies of the same file, even if that file exists on multiple PCs. It has been a crazy week to say the least. If youre like me, you wanted to make sure that the specific Windows updates that patch the WannaCry ransomware. Increase security, evolve your datacenter, and innovate faster with Microsoft Windows Server 2016the cloudready operating system. The HP Universal Print Drivers HP Universal Printing PCL 5 and PCL 6 are dependent on the Microsoft Windows Unidriver unidrv. When it comes to admin rights, knowing who you can trust is not always easy. But while auditing limitations wont do you any favors, new features in R2s Event. Health monitoring Can centrally track the health of all PCs on the network, including antivirus and firewall status. File sharing Creates and operates network shares for computers to store the files remotely, acting as a network attached storage device. Separate categories are provided for common file types like Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos. The files are indexed for fast searching. Printer sharing Allows a print server to handle print jobs for all users. Shadow Copy Uses Volume Shadow Copy Service to take point in time snapshots that allow older versions of files to be recovered. Headless operation No monitor or keyboard is required to manage the device. Remote administration is performed by using the Windows Home Server Console client software provided in the bundle. Remote Desktop Services1. LAN. 1. 6Remote access gateway Allows remote access to any connected PC on the network, including the server itself, over the Internet. Media streaming Can stream media to an Xbox 3. Windows Media Connect. Selective data redundancy Guards against a single drive failure by duplicating selected data across multiple drives. Expandable storage Provides a unified single and easily expandable storage space, removing the need for drive letters. Extensibility through add ins Add ins allow third party developers to extend the features and functionality of the server. Add Ins can be developed using the Windows Home Server SDK, to provide additional services to the client computers or work with the data already on the server. Add ins can also be ASP. NET applications, hosted in IIS 6 running on WHS. Server backup Backs up files which are stored within shared folders on the server to an external hard drive. TechnologyeditHome Server ConsoleeditThe configuration interface is designed to be user friendly enough that it can be set up without prior knowledge of server administration. The configuration interface, called the Home Server Console, is delivered as a Remote Desktop Protocol application to remote PCs while the application runs on the server itself, the GUI is rendered on the remote system. The Home Server Console client application can be accessed from any Windows PC. The server itself requires no video card or peripherals it is designed to require only an Ethernet card and at least one Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 computer. Drive ExtendereditWindows Home Server Drive Extender was a file based replication system that provided three key capabilities 1. Multi disk redundancy so that if any given disk failed, data was not lost. Arbitrary storage expansion by supporting any type of hard disk drive e. Serial ATA, USB, Fire. Wire in any mixture and capacity, similar in concept to JBODA single folder namespace no drive lettersWith drive extender, users could add larger capacity hard disk drives and then could offline lesser capacity drives to upgrade capacity online. For example, if the user was reaching capacity of the share with five terabytes of the six terabyte capacity used with six one terabyte drives then the user could offline one of the one terabyte drives and physically replace it with a two terabyte drive. The WHS automatically equalizes the redistribution of used space across all available drives on a regular basis. The offline process would compress the used data across the minimum amount of drives allowing for the removal of one of the lesser capacity drives. Once replaced with a drive of higher capacity the system will automatically redistribute used capacity among the pool to ensure space capacity on each drive. Users specifically those who configure a familys home server dealt with storage at two levels Shared Folders and Disks. The only concepts relevant regarding disks was whether they had been added to the home servers storage pool or not and whether the disk appeared healthy to the system or not. This was in contrast with Windows Logical Disk Manager which requires a greater degree of technical understanding in order to correctly configure a RAID array. Shared Folders had a name, a description, permissions, and a flag indicating whether duplication redundancy was on or off for that folder. If duplication was on for a Shared Folder which was the default on multi disk Home Server systems and not applicable to single disk systems then the files in that Shared Folder were duplicated and the effective storage capacity was halved. However, in situations where a user may not have wanted data duplicated e. TV shows that had been archived to a Windows Home Server from a system running Windows Media Center, Drive Extender provided the capability to not duplicate such files if the server was short on capacity or manually mark a complete content store as not for duplication. A known limitation of Drive Extender was that it in some cases changed timestamp of directories and files when data was moved around between disks. According to Microsoft this was expected behaviour. This caused unexpected behaviour when using clients that sort media based on date. Examples are XBMC, Media. Portal, and Squeezebox Server. The aforementioned programs worked fine with WHS however, files may have appeared out of order due to this caveat. CancellationeditOn 2. November 2. 01. 0, Microsoft announced that Drive Extender would be removed from Windows Home Server 2. This announcement has led to public outcry in the announcements comments section. Criticism of Drive Extenders removal is mainly related to it being seen as a core feature of Windows Home Server and a key reason for adoption. As a replacement for Drive Extender, Microsoft states that OEMs will use RAID on their Windows Home Server products. Computer Backup and RestoreeditWindows Home Server Computer Backup automatically backs up all of the computers in a home to the server using an image based system that ensures point in time based restoration of either entire PCs or specific files and folders. Complete bare metal restores are initiated through a restore bootable CD, file based restores are initiated through the WHS client software which allows the users to open a backup and drag and drop files from it.