Lights Management for Windows Home Server 2011 is a driver that powers the LED drive indicator lights on legacy (WHS v1) OEM hardware that has been upgraded to Windows Home Server 2011.

Compatible hardware includes the HP MediaSmart Server EX48x and EX49x series as well as the HP Data Vault X510 and Lenovo D400, Acer Aspire easyStore Home Server H340, H341 and H342.

What’s new in v1.06?

• Support for Acer H341 and H342. Please do some tests and report any issues.
• Disk light status can be changed in the configuration file. This is particularly useful for users of DrivePool, DriveBender, RAID arrays and drives without shares when the user does not want a blinking aqua LED.
• Removed some unnecessary DLL’s from the setup.

With a dearth of Windows Home Server 2011 solutions on the market from big brand OEMs, a number of system builders have popped up (particularly in Europe) offering a range of models from the humble to the powerful.

The UK’s HumuHumu is one such start-up. Launched earlier in the year, the company specialises in WHS 2011 solutions, which boils down to a single configuration at this point (available in a choice of colours).

Features and Specifications

The HumuHumu Home Server is based on a dual-core Intel Atom D525 processor, running at 1.8GHz, supported by a generous 4GB RAM and a single 2TB hard drive. As is now common on most home servers and PCs, networking is supported by Gigabit Ethernet. 1 eSATA, 4 Rear USB 2.0 ports (and two up front)  are supplied on the chassis for storage expansion, which with limited internal storage, is highly recommended. A second drive can be installed at purchase, which slots into the device’s spare 5.25″ drive bay, courtesy of a mounting bracket.

It’s not the most powerful home server you’ll find out there in the market, but we’ve seen plenty of Atom-based home servers do a decent job, and unless you have a huge media collection, 4TB storage should keep you going for some time.

What’s in the Box?

Open up the box and you’ll find:

• Windows Home Server Getting Started Guide
• HumuHumu Quick Start Guide
• 8GB OS Recovery USB Flash Drive
• 2m RJ45 network cable
• UK Power cable
• Windows Home Server 2011 Original Installation DVD

Providing the USB Recovery Drive is a great move – should your server need recovering at any point, there’s no need to dig out CDs/DVDs – simply slot in the USB Flash Drive, and it’ll get your server back up and running. It’s also nice to see a couple of reasonably well created Quick Start Guides in the box – these kind of support materials are often missed by System Builders, and they’re essential to delivering a positive experience.

First Looks

Available in a choice of Blue, Silver, Red or Black, if you want to liven up your server cupboard, then you have plenty of choice. Our review unit is the Blue model – and the chassis is certainly one to behold. It’s a Lian Li PC-Q07 Mini Tower, clad in the traditional brushed aluminium and steel finish. Sized to hold a Mini-ITX motherboard, its compact dimensions - (W)193mm x (H)290mm x (D)208mm – make for a small footprint server that should fit into tight nooks and crannies. That said, small chassis require compromise, and in this case it’s on storage – just two drive bays are available on the PC-Q07, which is a shame as from the outside, it looks like there’s room for more. That aside, it’s a stunning case.

At the front, you’ll find a flush fitting power button and drive indicator light, with the two USB 2.0 ports seated at the bottom of the front panel. The side panels are both punched for heat extraction, whilst you’ll also find a lot of holes at the rear for air-flow, accompanying the standard power socket (with switch) and a standard set of motherboard connectors at the rear.

Overall, it’s a great looking piece of kit – but if you’re looking for performance, it’s what’s inside that also counts.

Expertise Level: Medium

Lights Management for Windows Home Server 2011 is a driver that powers the LED drive indicator lights on legacy (WHS v1) OEM hardware that has been upgraded to Windows Home Server 2011.

Compatible hardware includes the HP MediaSmart Server EX48x and EX49x series as well as the HP Data Vault X510 and Lenovo D400, Acer Aspire easyStore Home Server H340, H341 and H342.

Developer: Louis

Download: Lights Management for Windows Home Server 2011

Release History

v1.06 (September 2011)

• Support for Acer H341 and H342. Please do some tests and report any issues.
• Disk light status can be changed in the configuration file. This is particularly useful for users of DrivePool, DriveBender, RAID arrays and drives without shares when the user does not want a blinking aqua LED.
• Removed some uncessary DLL’s from the setup.

v1.05 (July 2011)

• Modified LightsTester to be able to force a specific driver family to test on unsupported hardware.
• The application now works with Lights-Out

We’re hearing reports from Mac OSX Lion beta testers that Apple’s all new operating system update breaks the HP MediaSmart Server’s ability to back up the Mac.

Once you’ve updated your Mac to the new release, you’ll find the HP MediaSmart Server client can still detect the home server on the network, but is unable to remount the drive – leaving you to work through the same manual workarounds as other Windows Home Server v1 owners.

With the MediaSmart Server team at HP now disbanded to work on webOS devices, we’d be surprised to see a compatibility patch released by the company. Windows Home Server 2011 is due to support Mac backups courtesy of a (still unreleased) third party add-in. HP MediaSmart Server owners currently backing up their Macs will now be faced with the dilemna of holding fire on their OSX Lion updates later this month, or plumping for a WHS 2011 upgrade.

Thanks to Gatsby Assassin for the tip.

Drive Bender, the storage pooling add-in for Windows Home Server 2011 has hit Beta 4 – a significant release as it represents the final beta of the add-in’s lengthy development period. Developer Division-M also announced that beta registrations were due to close very soon.

As reported by mediasmartserver.net, Release 1.1.5.0 brings a number of huge new features into the product, alongside a swathe of fixes. New is the ability to enable/disable drive balancing, read caching to improve streaming speeds, CRC validation of duplicated files and drive renaming.

Drive Bender Beta 4 will get a number of update releases with bug fixes, before a Release Candidate is issued.

Full details are as follows:

Release v1.1.5.0 – beta (2011-06-21)

• Update: A new version of the WHS 2011 addin.
• Bug fix: WHS client backup could sometimes fail, this has been fixed.
• Bug fix: Drive balancing no longer balances Drive Bender specific files.
• Bug fix: Windows update no longer fails (permission issue fixed).
• Update: The drive merge functionality has been improved.
• Update The drive removal functionality has been improved.
• Update The drive add functionality has been improved.
• Added: Drive convert feature to convert an existing non pooled drive into a pooled drive.
• Added: Option – Smooth Stream. This is file read caching to improve file streaming performance (default = disabled).
• Added: Option – CRC file validation of duplicated files (default = enabled). Disabling this reverts to file size validation.
• Added: Option – Log level. The specifies the amount of logging taking place (default = none).
• Added: Option – Drive balancing. You can enable / disable balancing as required (default = enabled).
• Added: Option – Drive renaming. When adding a drive to the pool, it is now renamed to make its use obvious (default = enabled).
• Added: Option – Drive letter management. Allows Drive Bender to manage drive letters for drives added to, and removed from the pool (default = enabled). Note that due to a bug, this feature was disabled prior to release.
• Bug fix: Renaming and deleting files and folders should no longer fails with errors.
• Bug fix: Recycle bin support have been fixed.
• Bug fix: Remove Windows assigned mount points (i.e. drive letters) if there is a conflict with a Drive Bender mount point.
• Added: Pool recovery feature. This can recover a pool (or pools) from connect drive without any configuration information (to be uses with OS re-installs etc)
• Added: Pool configuration repair. Drive Bender now validates and repair broken configurations.
• Added: WHS running tasks and notification windows (full WHS notification integration to come).
• Known issue: Fault tolerant mode (i.e. when a drive is missing from the pool) is still not displaying duplicated files (will be fixed in the next update).
• Known issue: The WHS move folder feature throws an error (to be fixed in an update).
• Known issue: The opening of web links from the getting started tab are opening on the server, not the client.
• Known issue: Documentation incomplete.

Let us us know what you think of Drive Bender beta 4, and make sure you rate the add-in for other readers.

Download: Drive Bender Beta 4

Time for a bit of forum focus. This week one of our forum members, mimoid (Thomas), posted a great guide to  installing Windows Server 2008 R2 on headless home server hardware, such as the HP MediaSmart Server, HP Data Vault or Acer Aspire easyStore Home Server. As these products do not have monitor, mouse or keyboard connectors, installing operating systems can be a challenge. Fortunately, guides like this one make life a lot easier.

Here’s the post in full:

Unable to resist tinkering with my WHS server (HP X510), I took on a challenge to upgrade the onboard plain vanilla WHS OS to Windows Server 2008 R2. The X510 (and EX495) hardware is in its out-of-the-box configuration perfectly capable of running Windows Server 2008 R2, unless you are looking for some heavy virtualization tasks and I figured that the Server 2008 would give me a much more detailed control over my entire setup. Honestly, I was also curious to see if it could be done at all. The answer is yes, and if you are trying to do something similar, here are my notes.

I researched for a long time around various unattended USB-installations with little success, so I began looking for alternative and easier routes. I began wondering whether or not the trick would be to use a different computer to perform the installation on, and then simply transplant the operative system into the WHS server. Of course just installing the entire Server 2008 OS on a desktop computer and then swapping the disk drive did not work because of the differences in the peripherals, like network adapters, mass storage controller devices and so on. I tried, but I immediately ended up with a totally unresponsive server (probably a blue screen or something).

Well, finally I managed to find a way of getting Server 2008 on the WHS machine. For a successful installation, this is what you need:

1) A Windows Server 2008 R2 installation DVD
2) A blank hard drive
3) A standard USB keyboard

Begin with replacing the internal hard drive of a standard desktop computer to a blank hard drive. This will be the OS drive of the new server, so choose the size wisely.

(You may wish to add additional disks in a RAID-5 array later, but since you will be using a software RAID-controller, the OS disk cannot be part of the RAID array. You can thus get away with a relatively small drive as a system drive. Having an unused 1TB disk at hand, I installed the OS on this, and added three 2TB disks in a RAID-5 array later on.)

Start up the desktop computer and insert the Windows Server installation disk to begin the installation process. The trick is to run the installation to a point where all the necessary files have been placed on the new drive, but before the server OS becomes aware of its surroundings and adapts the remaining installation to it. This point is the first reboot during the installation sequence. Wait until the installer starts the reboot process. As soon as the computer has shut down, but before it has a chance to restart, switch the computer off (pull the plug or whatever).

Now take out the half-baked drive and move over to the WHS server. Shut it down, and pull out all the drives. Insert a standard USB keyboard into the front USB jack. Insert the new drive into one of the available slots and start the server.

You will of course now no longer be able to see the rest of the installation, nevertheless, you will still be requested to perform a few input tasks with the keyboard, blindly so to speak. Since I had already done a dress-rehearsal on my desktop computer, I had taken notes about what to press and where, so it was quite a simple task. As long as you don’t slip on the keys or rush ahead, it should work just fine. I actually performed this operation three times, just to be sure. Here is the cuesheet:

1. After the first start, the server will boot up. It runs for a few minutes until it reaches another reboot point. You will see that the health light at the front will go red, and then again turns blinking blue as the server finishes the reboot cycle.

2. Wait a while – three or four minutes will do. At this time, the installer has come to a point where it prompts you to change the administrator password.

3. Press ENTER

4. Type the new password

5. Arrow down

6. Type the password again

7. Tab

8. ENTER

9. ENTER again.

Wait a few minutes and grab a coffee to give the installer time to finish.

At this time the installer is finished, but you will still need to enable the Remote Desktop service and also configure the firewall to allow RDP connections. This sounds awfully complicated without seeing what you are doing, but is in fact remarkably easy to do.

10. Press Alt+K (simultaneously)

11. Arrow down

12. ENTER

13. Press Alt and then F

14. Press X

15. Arrow down

16. ENTER

17. ENTER

That’s it!

You should now be able to find the server’s IP-address on your router’s web page. Use this to remote into the server and finish what is left of the installation, like entering the product key, changing the server name, configuring server roles, installing antivirus software and so on.

Oh, you will need to perform one final task, and that is to download and install the driver for the SATA storage controller. It is a Silicon Image SiI3531 and you can download the 64-bit driver from here:

http://www.siliconim…duct.aspx?id=80

Just a sidenote for the server savvy users: if you wish to reuse the DNS domain that you have registered for your WHS (“servername.homeserver.com”), do not forget to export the DNS Server Authentication certificate from the WHS and import it into the new Server 2008 setup before wiping the old WHS disks.

A big thank you to Thomas for posting the walkthrough.

My Movies for Windows Home Server provides automated disc copying of Audio CDs and movies from internal or USB attached optical drives, adding meta-data to copied discs, or movies already stored on the server by monitoring your movie folders.

As reported over at MediaSmartServer.net, the latest pre-release edition of the add-in has been published for both Windows Home Server v1 and Windows Home Server 2011. Changes are as follows:

My Movies for Windows Home Server 2.00 Pre Release 2

Fix: FolderMonitoring not working with MonitoredFolders
Fix: GUI in TV Folder monitor.

My Movies for Windows Home Server 2011 2.00 Pre Release 8:

Fix: Changed name of Nimbie dll file.
Fix: Attempt to load Nimbie control file differently.
Fix: Nimbie prepare state will be cancelled after two minutes.
Fix: MovieDiscCopier started copying music discs as if they where a DVD.
Fix: Music file naming is converted to users language, if they are the default format.

Download:  My Movies for Windows Home Server

Alex Kuretz of mediasmartserver.net pinged us earlier today to let us know he had released an update to his Remote Notification add-in for Windows Home Server v1.  The major feature added to this version is support for Windows Home Server Health Alerts on your Mac desktop as well as reporting of Time Machine backup status to your Windows Home Server for centralized reporting and alerting. The current backup status of all Macs that are running Remote Notification is also included in the Daily Email Reports.

The bullet list of changes are as follows:

• Feature: Mac application displays WHS Health Alerts on the Mac Desktop via a menu item
• Feature: Mac application reports Time Machine backup status to the server for monitoring and alerting
• Feature: Mac Client status is displayed in the Daily Reports if you have any Macs configured
• Feature: More details in short message formats (Twitter and SMS), fully utilizing them to their max length when possible
• Feature: Added “Create Debug File” button to Advanced settings tab to facilitate easier support
• Bug: Windows Updates times in Daily Reports now correctly reported in Local time rather than UTC time
• Bug: Recipient Add/Edit dialog updated to properly enable the Save button when settings are changed
• Bug: Don’t allow Twitter recipients to change their Recipient Type, must delete and add new Recipient instead

Alex Kuretz today released an update to Remote Notification. This Windows Home Server v1 add-in is designed to forward the System Health Notifications from the Home Server to an email address of your choosing.

New in v1.5.0.7:

• Bug: Client Health errors in Daily Reports now correctly display Red instead of Yellow
• Feature: Client Backups “Last good backup” time in Daily Reports now displays “Never Backed Up” instead of Jan 1 1601
• Feature: Daily Reports now display Available and Total amount of both physical memory and virtual memory
• Feature: Daily Reports now display additional Windows Update statistics: Last installed date, Last checked for updates date, and Reboot required
• Feature: Changes to the Remote Notification service to speed up start time

Download: Remote Notification

My Movies for Windows Home Server provides automated disc copying of Audio CD’s and movies from internal or USB attached optical drives, adding meta-data to copied discs, or movies already stored on the server by monitoring your movie folders. It acts as a back-end server for My Movies for Windows Media Center, which brings your movie collection to life, displaying rich metadata for each of your movies including artwork, plot synopses, cast and crew information and a whole lot more.

If you’ve been considering upgrading to Windows Home Server 2011, but thought you’d be lost without My Movies, then good news. Mediasmartserver.net picked up that a pre-release of My Movies for Windows Home Server 2011 was released last week. My Movies for Windows Home Server 2011 – 2.00 Pre Release 1 operates as back-end server for My Movies 4.00 Pre Release 5, so that’s double beta – expect the odd bump and bug along the way.

Whilst the new release offers all of the same features as the WHS v1 edition, the Windows Home Server 2011 add-in also supports the monitoring of TV Series – a new feature in My Movies 4.

A full preview guide is available here – make sure to read it before upgrading as there are a number of upgrade requirements that you’ll need to be aware of.

Download: My Movies for Windows Home Server 2011

Ah, it should have been different to this. When I think back to the first conversations I had with Microsoft about Windows Home Server 2011, or “Vail” as it was known back then, they were exciting times – discussions brimming with optimism, following the successful launch of the first generation of the platform. The v1 data corruption bug was in the past, and the talk was of new features that would allow Windows Home Server to build momentum from its early adopter phase into a more robust, more mainstream product. The move  to the underlying Windows Server 2008 R2 platform would mean no more development on the legacy Windows Server 2003 OS, enabling better driver support and importantly, enhancing the opportunities for cross-collaboration with other development teams in Microsoft.

Fast forward  2+ years, and it’s fair to say the product that will ship at some point this year is a pale shadow of what Vail could, and should have been. Microsoft’s reorganisation to bring together the home and small business server teams, whilst undoubtedly sensible from a commercial perspective, led to an organisation that from the outside appears to be less nimble, less single-minded and less free to innovate. Vitally, it’s a team that has had to develop not one, but four products simultaneously, in the shape of Windows Small Business Server 2011, Windows Small Business Server Essentials 2011, Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials and finally Windows Home Server 2011. With a huge amount to deliver, it’s understandable that feature sets across the four SKUs would converge. And with three lucrative, well established business customers to serve, and one low margin, high risk consumer market to crack, it doesn’t take a genius to work out where the effort would be spent.

All this before we’ve even started a discussion about the removal of Drive Extender. The decision to remove Windows Home Server’s storage pooling technology undoubtedly delayed the release of the “Colorado” suite of products (Windows Small Business Server Essentials 2011 “Aurora”, Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials “Breckenridge” and finally Windows Home Server 2011 “Vail”) but that aside, with a four year gap between the release of Windows Home Server v1 and its successor, clearly Microsoft have had a mountain to climb getting Vail out of the door.

So, here we are at the start of the Windows Home Server 2011 era. Many of you have tried out the beta and release candidates, many have avoided the test release due to the Drive Extender debacle. But the question in most WHS v1 users minds today is whether they should consider upgrading to Windows Home Server 2011. As a WHS v1 user myself, it’s a question I’ve been pondering personally for the last three months, and being totally honest with you, I still haven’t made a decision. As I stated at the time, the loss of Drive Extender ripped the heart out of Windows Home Server, but the new edition retains a lot of new features (despite what you may think, Microsoft developers haven’t been sitting on their hands for the last four years). So, it’s time for an equation – do the new features in Windows Home Server 2011 outweigh the loss of Drive Extender? If the answer is yes, then I’m going to jump in. If not, then I’ll stick with v1 until it reaches end of life (scheduled for 2013) and review my options then.

(Obviously, WGS being WGS, we’ll be covering WHS 2011 either way, and there’ll be a couple of WHS 2011 test servers knocking around for reviews – but I’m talking about upgrading my “production” v1 home server.)

So, whilst I know many are still very upset at the loss of DE (and understandably so), let’s suspend that for a few minutes as we take an objective comparison between Windows Home Server v1 and WHS 2011, feature by feature to build the equation. Doing so will hopefully inform my personal upgrade decision, and may inform yours too.

One note before we get started – I’ve deliberately delayed publishing this comparison to allow the dust to settle around the DE decision and review the Windows Home Server 2011 Release Candidate, which should be feature complete. We’re also now aware of a number of third-party developments which flesh out the Windows Home Server 2011 story a little, and of course, additional third-party solutions may come to the fore at any time, so consider this a preliminary view with all of the information we have available at this time.

Cost

Let’s start with an easy one. Whilst Windows Home Server 2011′s pricing has yet to be announced, Microsoft aren’t going to give it away for free (unless you’re on an MSDN/TechNet subscription). Let’s assume for now that Microsoft go for a similar price to WHS v1 – around the $100 mark. That’s $100 you don’t have to spend if you stick with WHS v1, right?

WHS v1	WHS 2011	Winner
Free - well, you've already bought it, so there's no extra charge for sticking with it.	No pricing yet announced, but let's assume a similar price to v1 - $100.	WHS v1

Hardware Requirements

Before digging into the software, let’s take a look at the hardware requirements. Depending on your current setup, upgrading to Windows Home Server may require you to purchase new hardware. Why? Two reasons stand out. The first is that like all recent Windows Server operating systems, Windows Home Server 2011 requires a 64-bit compatible processor. Now most modern processors fit the bill, but if you’re running an older home server, or if, like many, you re-purposed an ageing PC for home server use, it may be time to crack open the wallet.

Secondly, the march of time has led to Windows Home Server 2011 requiring more powerful hardware than its predecessor. If your v1 home server brushes Microsoft’s minimum specifications, again, upgrading is going to require some investment. So, for this comparison, I’m working on the basis that lower power, no investment required is better than having to spend money.

As a result, we can clearly see that Windows Home Server v1 runs on older, lower specification hardware, and if you’re an existing v1 WHS user, you don’t need to spend any money if you don’t upgrade. So, v1 wins the Hardware Requirements comparison.

Migration

Let’s think about migration next. There is no easy method for upgrading from Windows Home Server v1 to Windows Home Server 2011 on the same hardware. Like all x86 to x64 operating system upgrades, it has to be a clean install. For the more technical amongst you (and let’s remember, WGS has a pretty technical readership), a clean install isn’t so much of an issue, but the migration path is exacerbated by the fact that you like have a huge amount of data sitting on your home server. Unless you’re happy to wipe off all of that data, you’re going to need to move all of that data on to an external hard drive or network PC, format your drives, install Windows Home Server 2011, then copy all of your data back again. It’s not a technically troublesome task, but it is inconvenient, and will take some time and consideration to ensure you don’t lose any data.

I fed back the need/opportunity for Microsoft to create some kind of migration tools to make the upgrade from v1 to 2011 more palatable over two years ago. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have proffered that feedback. Those tools do not exist, and I doubt whether they will do. So, again for comparison, we’ll work on the basis that no effort is better than a lot of effort, and that means staying with v1 wins the migration battle.

Underlying Platform

We often think of Windows Home Server as an operating system – that’s not strictly true. It’s actually a set of features and services that sit atop of an underlying platform. In the case of Windows Home Server v1, it’s hosted on the wildly popular, if venerable Windows Server 2003, an operating system that is still supported by Microsoft when it comes to serious bug fixes and security issues, but is no longer actively developed. Increasingly, it will no longer be developed for - when it comes to operating systems, newer is often (but not always) better, and in the case of Windows Home Server 2011, sitting on the all-new Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 means you have the latest and greatest underlying technology powering the platform. As an added bonus,a healthy chunk of that software being developed for Windows Server 2008 R2 is going to work with Windows Home Server 2011 (depending on the role requirements). Vitally, driver support for new hardware is much, much better in the new platform, and that includes support for high-capacity, Advanced Format hard drives. Chalk one up for Windows Home Server 2011.

OEM Support

A difficult one to call. In its time, Windows Home Server v1 had reasonable OEM support from hardware manufacturers, with mainstream vendors such as HP, Lenovo, LaCie, ASUS and Acer selling home servers in major markets around the world. There was also a pleasing variety of models from low cost, single drive units through to 4 and 8 bay servers available. Today’s picture is a little different, and the number of vendors is definitely in decline. Dig around, though, and you can still find v1 hardware on sale. On the flip side, those same manufacturers have hardly been clamouring to support Microsoft’s new platform. To date, Redmond have only mentioned Acer and UK system builder Tranquil PC pledging any kind of support to Windows Home Server 2011, although conversations I had with LaCie at CES this year suggest they may also jump in with hardware later in the year. WHS 2011′s close kinship with Windows Small Business Server Essentials 2011 may present some hope for the platform, as we’re sure to see some of the major OEMs step up to participate in the small business market, but whether they’ll offer Windows Home Server 2011 as an installed option remains to be seen. If not, then a self-install may be an option for those desperate for OEM hardware. Microsoft remain tight lipped on OEM support for Windows SBS Essentials 2011 at this time. On balance, I’m calling this one a tie right now, but next year, WHS 2011 is likely to be the only game in town.