Windows Home Server Gets Power Pack 1

Microsoft released the beta of it today. If you are as beta weary as I am, you will be looking askance at any releases coming from Redmond as being legitimately worthy of consideration.

Ed Bott has announced the availability of this update on his ZDNet entry for today, and although that messenger may give a certain amount of pause to the reader, the article is fairly conservative in its proclamations. No huge claims are made, other than the one many have been awaiting for months – the data corruption bug has been squashed.

If this is true, there will be many interested in purchasing the OS, as there seems to be no end to those who feel a home server is necessary. Rather than debate the need, I will accept that there are some that have a volume of information large enough that its sharing with other computers on the network would bog down a machine used for dual duty – a workstation and a server.

I do think, however, that there are enough people who have machines powerful enough that Microsoft’s own virtual machine software could be used to have a pair of VMs running with only minimal affect on the workstation.

As far as Windows Home Server is concerned, it is still amazing that the part of the code that was causing the data corruption was the area that should have been left out in the first place.

The argument goes like this – anyone too simple to realize that there are different drives on a machine, and that data duplication is used to achieve a level of confidence, should not be allowed near the storage of ‘vital’ data. Also, although many motherboards are available with the ability to form a RAID 1 set, the number of add-in cards which make the management and safety issues easily understood and administered are almost legion. Once again, if you don’t know your way around the concepts of storage on a computer, you should not be allowed near the computer storing important stuff.

The very fact that Microsoft chooses to release a beta, which is, for the most part, a fixpack  should make expert users wary of the outcome, and make the backup of data offsite, before the installation of this ‘Power Pack’ a must.

from ZDNet (Ed Bott’s entry)

That noise you just heard from outside Seattle was a collective sigh of relief, as Microsoft announced that it has released a public beta version of Power Pack 1 for Windows Home Server. It’s more than a service pack, with at least two significant new features (client support for x64-based Windows machines and the ability to back up data from the server to external media) and a long list of enhanced features. Under normal circumstances, I’d be writing first and most about those new and improved features and comparing the improvements to the initial release of Windows Home Server last year. But instead, I’ll be answering the question that every Windows Home Server user wants to know: Does this update fix the data corruption bug first announced late last year?

The short answer is yes.

The longer answer is “yes, and the delay was worth it.” Power Pack 1 was originally announced five months ago at CES, but its public debut was pushed back to await the fix for the data corruption bug. What was supposed to be a quick fix turned out to be much more complex. The underlying problem, according to official announcements and confirmed by insiders I’ve spoken with over the past few months, was buried deep in a crucial Windows Home Server component: the Drive Extender feature. On any system with two or more hard drives installed, this code handles the process of migrating data between drives and duplicating shared data to protect it from data loss caused by hardware failures; if this code failed, the files being migrated were damaged, usually beyond repair.

To make sure the bug was fixed, once and for all, Microsoft did a top-to-bottom code review of all the interactions between the Drive Extender functionality and the underlying file system. How serious was this review? A veteran Microsoft developer, one of the four original architects of NTFS, was lured back to work full-time with the team reviewing and fixing the code.

This release is faster and more polished than Windows Home Server v1, and it appears to be as bulletproof as the Windows Server 2003 code on which WHS is based. Over the past few weeks I’ve tested release candidates of this beta code on a pair of test systems. During that time I’ve backed up 10 separate computers daily - more than 200 hundred individual backup sets - and I’ve performed more than a dozen full and partial restores without a single failure. Basic operations like transferring files and opening backup sets from the server are noticeably faster than they were in the original release of Windows Home Server. I’ve added and removed hard drives and transferred many terabytes of data between a wide assortment of Windows XP and Vista clients and other members of the Windows Server family. In all those file operations, I haven’t seen a single data hiccup.

Microsoft is confident based on its internal testing and feedback from the first wave of beta testers that the data corruption bug is squashed for good. In the blog post announcing the availability of the PP1 beta, General Manager Charlie Kindel said: “We are running this public beta with the aspiration that we will get thousands of beta testers to help us prove that we not only have fixed ‘the bug,’ but have significantly improved all parts of Windows Home Server…”

Although this is billed as a beta release, I have no hesitation in recommending it for any Windows Home Server installation, provided that you first read and heed the release notes.  (Seriously, read the notes first. They’re well written and useful and contain a warning or two that might apply to you.) To download an update package for your existing Windows Home Server system, go to Microsoft Connect and sign up for the beta. If you want to start from scratch on a clean system, sign up for the beta and download the full evaluation version (good for 120 days), available in ISO format.

The look, feel, and basic operation of Windows Home Server haven’t changed noticeably in this update, but just about every feature has received some polishing. Here’s a quick summary of the Power Pack 1 feature list:

Connector software for systems running x64 versions of Windows Vista. With this client software installed, x64 users have access to every feature available in the x86 version, including backup and management via the Windows Home Server console. (And to anticipate one question: The new x64 connector will not work with older builds of Windows Home Server.)
Server backup capabilities. Using this build you can plug in an external hard drive and designate it as a Server Backup drive (see below), which you can then use to back up the contents of shared data folders on the server. (Microsoft previously announced that this feature would allow backups of the backup database as well, but that capability was cut from the feature list and will not be available in the final Power Pack 1 release.

The Connector software for x64 versions of Vista are nice, but then this should have been part of the original release, as it only makes sense that a company that wanted a server OS sold to people would make it available to be used with all current products.

-

Quote of the day:

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry. - Martin Gardner

Technorati Tags: Windows Home Server - Power Pack 1 - beta - fixpack - Microsoft - bug repairs - x64 Connector