I've been blogging about my experience with Windows Home Server,. Robert McLaws has a great article on building a Windows Home Server on a budget.

Personally, I have it running on a Dell Poweredge SC420 server and it has been running without issue backing up my PCs, and providing a central file store.

I have Windows Home Server beta running, and it is running well. One thing missing though is media serving capabilities. I have multiple Vista PCs running Media Center, but I have several DVDs ripped to my file share on Windows Home Server. I wanted to be able to bring that media to a central location and watch on my TV in the family room. We have a theater room that has a projector and Media Center PC, but the family room has no PC connected to it. I could opt to have the media stored on the WHS and purchase another Media Center PC, but to have one that looks good ...

Not really a test, but I currently have four drives on my Windows Home Server beta providing 1TB of storage. One of the USB enclosures are giving me a little trouble not being recognized after boot up. Yesterday I had to reboot the WHS machine, and the one drive didn't come back online. When going to the admin interface it displayed the drive as being offline. All share access went on as normal. I was able to access my duplicated shares without any problems. In addition, the file share that weren't set up for duplication were still there with files in them. Some files became unavailable until the USB came back up and joined the rest of the drives in the cluster.

So far everything works g ...

As I blogged earlier, I've been beta testing the new Windows Home Server (WHS) product from Microsoft. The storage management features of this server just plain rock! As you can see in the figure, I currently configured about 758GB of storage, and one drive is available which will bring the storage level to over 1TB! Adding additional storage is as easy as plugging in a USB drive, and adding it to my drive array. You can click on a share being managed by WHS and enable duplication. ...

I've been selected as a beta tester for the Windows Home Server software. After looking over the documentation, there appears to be three primary features to the product:

1. Remote access: You can access any of the PCs on the home LAN from a remote location. This service is provided for free via a website.
2. Media Sharing: The ability to send your media to devices on the network, this includes central storage of Recorded TV for your Media Center PCs, and streaming to your Xbox 360.
3. Backup and Restore: The ability to backup all PCs within the network. This is assisted by ...

By far the easiest install I've done in a Windows environment and I installed operating systems on many machines. I think I clicked once or twice during the entire install. The only problem I had was getting the OS to recognize my Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet adapter in the Dell SC420 machine I installed Windows Home Server on.

Getting the clients set up is a breeze as well. Just load some client software on the machine and they're set up for shared folders, and backups. Microsoft is really aiming at the co ...

Windows Home Server was unveiled at the CES in Las Vegas last month. Now the Windows Home Server team is blogging. We'll be watching to see the latest on this new product out of Redmond.

Hat tip Inside Microsoft...