I've been meaning to post my first impressions since it was announced that Windows Home Server has been released to manufacturing, and I finally managed to get a spare 15 minutes.
I ran the "new" operating system in a virtual machine on a run of the mill Dell laptop with 512mb RAM allocated to the guest OS and was surprised to find that the performance was adequate to play around with. The first thing that I noticed was that it's simple. Actually, REALLY simple! It's clear that the main focus of this OS was to allow users to have access to some of the nice features of commercial servers without needing an IT degree.
The main areas I ended up playing around with were:
- Automated backups of network PCs
- Network security
- File/media sharing, and
- Remote access to your home network
I was very pleased to find out that all these features were very simple to set up. The only one that required a little digging around was to enable the remote access to the network. I imagine this would not be used by most people, but it is by far my favourite feature of Home Server. Once I set it up correctly I was able to remote desktop into any PC on my network through a browser from any location. The setup also included the creation of a free subdomain that I could use to browse to.
Once I got everything up and running Home Server ran very smoothly and worked brilliantly with the Vista machines I have running. Overall, I think this is a great product for home users looking to setup a simple home network and for the more advanced user who wants to extend the reach of their home network without having to learn the more difficult server products that Microsoft offers.
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