Archive for July, 2010
Windows Home Server Setup
Monday, July 26th, 2010
NEPCW recently had the opportunity to work with Rob from http://www.EchoAV.net on a Windows Home Server (WHS) installation . We were sourced to build, configure and deploy the WHS to the customers site. We first started off by doing our due diligence by researching the specs and system requirements for WHS. WHS is built off Server 2003 platform and utilizes several interesting features including machine backups and drive duplication.
Our first order of business was to determine the drive configuration and sizes that we were going to use. We decided on two 2TB Hitachi drives in a non raid configuration. We toiled with the idea of using these drives in a RAID 1 configuration, but after some research we decided to let WHS deal with the drives and to utilize the duplication option in WHS for redundancy. WHS will take two drives of identical capacity and perform duplication which writes data to these drives identically in case of a drive failure, your data is backed up.
After we made the decision for duplication we loaded up WHS on a 2U rack mountable case with the following spec’s:
- LITE-ON CD/DVD Burner - Bulk Black SATA Model
iHAS124-04 - HITACHI Deskstar HD32000 IDK/7K (0S00164) 2TB
7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive
MSI NX8400GS-TD512EH GeForce 8400 GS 512MB
64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin
DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
GIGABYTE GA-EP45T-UD3LR LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX
Intel Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz LGA 775
95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor
Athena Power RM-2U2015SV48 Black 2U Rackmount
Server Case with power supply- Cavalry CAUM 2TB Black External Hard Drive
CAUM3702T0-B
After wrestling with SATA drivers so the WHS installation would actually see the drives, the installation went very smooth. During the install it reboots a few times and applies several OTA updates before you can even log in. Once we logged in we ran all available Windows updates and patches that it needed.
Since the two drives were installed WHS automatically put them into duplication mode, we tested this by copying data to the music share and watched it duplicate across the two drives. Now it does not update immediately with the duplication, but after a few minutes we could see the server storage report show the duplicate data.
What is interesting is that WHS shows the two 2TB drives as having almost 4TB of storage for the system, but in My Computer it just shows the 1 drive at 1.81TB.
Once this was complete we scheduled our visit to the customers site and installed the server and got it running on the network. We fired it up and then created the user accounts that duplicated the workstation accounts already in place. Once that was in place, we went to the Windows 7 Home Premium machine (W7HP) that would be connecting to it and ran the WHS connector software. Once it was connected we configured the workstation backups to happen between 12AM and 6AM everyday.
Windows Home Server Backups: Before installing this system we spun up 2 VM’s with WHS on one and Windows 7 Home Premium on another. We created the partnership and then let it complete a backup of the W7HP machine. Then we spun down the W7HP machine as if it had a hard drive failure. We then spun up another VM but just booted it from the WHS Recovery CD. When it came up it found our WHS VM and we plugged in the WHS password and we could see the backup it made of our W7HP VM. We chose the complete restore features and in no time we had our W7HP workstation back up and running, without original media and with all our data. Talk about slick, this made us very excited. This is the way all backup and restores like this should work.
You might ask yourself “How do you backup the Windows Home Server?”, and we would answer this way:
To deal with backing up the WHS itself, we decided a 2TB external drive utilizing NTBackup would do the trick. As of this writing all is working great, workstations are performing backups every night successfully and the WHS itself it backing up to the external drive, as well as duplicating across the internal disks.
We then moved all music, videos, pictures, documents and shared software to the WHS. We then setup the W7HP workstation with the built in Windows Media Center software. Then we pointed all media libraries to the WHS, added an XBox as a media extender and tested. Everything works great!
Rob from EchoAv setup 3 Sonos zones in the house along with a bunch of other cool Audio/Visual stuff that was pretty amazing.
All in all it was a great success for NEPCW!
Check http://www.EchoAV.net for all your Audio/Visual needs! Rob is doing some pretty exciting stuff with Sonos, iPad and much more!
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