Windows Home Server V2 – “Vail” Makes its Debut

After a period of expectancy, the next version of Windows Home Server has made its way to being released as a “public preview”. What this means is that the product is still very much in testing and many things may not work properly (or perhaps not at all).

Codenamed “Vail”, Microsoft has unleashed this second revision of its popular Windows Home Server operating system on its masses in the hopes that people will flush out heaps of bugs and put it through its paces. Of course, Microsoft warns that this software should not be used in production environments (which for the layperson means that you shouldn’t treat it as if it were finalised retail software – you could lose heaps of data and I mean heaps).

So what’s new in this version? To sum it up quickly:

• native DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) support,
• support for Windows 7 Homegroups,
• “Windows Live inspired” remote access to home computers,
• streaming and transcoding of music and video,
• the ability to separate the disk hosting the  operating system from the data disk array,
• the move to 64-bit only (which may cause an issue with upgrading from the original 32-bit only version).

I’ve yet to actually provision a virtual machine to get a closer look at it but I am excited by this development. I’ve used Windows Home Server since it was first released and reckon it has matured quite well (putting aside the data corruption bug that the original version faced in certain circumstances prior to the first service pack).

One thing I would have liked to have seen is native Time Machine support for Macintosh computers (similar to what HP have included in their own Windows Home Server devices). The features also seem to omit any sort of integration with Windows Live Mesh which would have been great in terms of remote synchronisation against devices outside of the home back to the Windows Home Server.

Another thing that seems to be missing is any mention of the removal of the 2TB disk capacity barrier for internal hard drives in a Windows Home Server. This is due to a limitation as a result of  MBR (Master Boot Record) disks being limited to 2TB in a single volume and the “Drive Extender” technology in Windows Home Server only working with legacy MBR drive partitioning and not with the GPT (GUID Partition Table) scheme. Certainly, I would look to consolidate existing smaller hard drives for larger ones to free up some space.

I guess there is always room for improvement though.

This is definitely something to keep an eye on if you have been wanting to consolidate and protect your media and backups at home and free yourself from fragmented data across all of your computers.

To get a feel for what Windows Home Server provides already in terms of functionality, check out my earlier post “Windows Home Server – A Great Backup & Storage Solution“.