A refresh of Lights-Out Service Pack 2 Beta was released this week for Windows Home Server v1 and WHS 2011. The power management add-in allows you to place your server in sleep or hibernation mode at scheduled times.

New in this release:

New option for client action after backup
Service Pack 2 Beta refresh introduces a new client option called “Force end action”. This option is enabled by default to ensure the previous behavior. If you disable this option, the action after backup is only executed if a start-up or wake-up for a scheduled backup has been detected AND if there has been no user activity in the last 10 minutes or during backup.

This new features prevents a standby or shutdown (after backup) if a user is already working on the machine. It also prevents a standby or shutdown (after backup) if the machine is already running before the backup has been started.

Other changes:

• Fixed end of DST problem with WHS v1 connector
• Fixed wrong date formatting in calendar for some regions like Japanese
• Fixed wrong backup date when client backup is disabled
• Fixed problem with deleted tasklist (delete was not handled, tasks were not removed)
• Fixed bug in edit properties dialog
• Changed action after backup: runs only if started for backup with no user activity

Download: Lights-Out (WHS 2011) | (WHS v1)

Recently, while I was configuring the AWIECO RemoteLauncher add-in, I stumbled upon some hidden functionality built into the Windows Home Server 2011 Dashboard application.  Normally, I have no alerts present in Information and Alerts area of my dashboard.  So, imagine my surprise when an Alert flashed up recently.

Double-click on the alert notification to open the ‘Alert Viewer’.

On this occasion, I was presented with a warning that important updates should be installed on my home server. Click on the alert on the left side of the window for more information about the alert. For this alert, I was presented an option at the bottom of the window to open Windows Update.

Click the ‘Open Windows Update’ link. This presented me with the Windows Update application for my home server.

Choose the updates you want to install and click OK.

Click Install updates.

Once the updates finish installing, you can restart your server by clicking ‘Restart now’.

Once the server has finished rebooting, restart the Dashboard and check the Information and Alerts area.

I continue to discover new ways to work more efficiently with Windows Home Server.   I hope you will too.

Comments about this article are welcomed; but, questions about specific problems you are experiencing are best addressed in the WGS forums. So, please address any issues regarding the Dashboard application and OS updates in the appropriate forum.

Back in November, Jim reviewed ISO Mounter - it’s an add-in for Windows Home Server v1 and 2011 which allows you to mount ISO files (DVD and CD images) stored on your server so they can be viewed directly through the server’s folder share on all of your PC’s and laptops. A brand new version of the add-in has just hit the streets – here’s what you can expect:

New Features:

• Burn ISO images to removable USB devices
• New “Unmount all” button to simplify unmounting of multiple images from the server Dashboard
• New “Rescan watch folder” to allow mounting of all pre-existing ISO image files in a watch folder

Enhancements:

• Cleaned up the user interface.  Moved some tasks from the main view into a separate “More Settings” dialog view
• Fixed crash when browsing for ISO files on Servers with a non-standard Share layout (e.g. server Shares are not stored in D:\ServerFolders)

Installation tips for WHS/SBS 2011:

• Uninstall the previous version of the add-in.  From the Server Dashboard select Add-ins | ISO Mounter | Remove the Add-in and then close the Dashboard
• Download the new version of the add-in, via the link above, to your server or a PC with Home Server Connector installed
• Double-click the isomounter.wssx file to begin the installation process
• Wait for the installation process to complete.  You’re done!
• All existing settings and registration information will be saved from the previous version.

Installation tips for WHS V1:

• From the WHS Console select Settings | Add-ins | Installed then Uninstall the previous version of ISO Mounter
• Download the new version of the software, via the link above, to your \\server\software\add-ins folder
• From the WHS Console select Settings | Add-ins | Available then Install the new version
• The WHS Console will restart
• All existing settings and registration information will be saved from the previous version. You’re done!

ISO Mounter is priced at $14.99/£10.26.

Download: ISO Mounter

One of the best features of Windows Home Server 2011 is its ability to backup all of the computers in the home. It would be great to keep every backup of every client computer forever. But, this is not practical because you will quickly run out of space on your server.  So, WHS automatically manages your backups based on a default backup retention policy. Here is how you can keep one or two backups longer than what the backup retention policy allows.

To view your retention policy, open the WHS 2011 Dashboard, select ‘Computers and backup’ and then click on ‘Additional client computer backup tasks’.

Based on my retention policy the longest any backup will be kept is 6 months. Here is a link to Microsoft’s page explaining the backup settings.

So as the title of this tutorial suggests, we want to keep a snapshot of our client computer indefinitely. Here’s how.

Let’s start by performing a manual backup. Open the Launchpad application and select ‘Backup’.

Click on the ‘Start backup’ button.

Enter a backup description and click OK.

When the backup completes, open the Dashboard. Select the ‘Computers and backup’ tab, then double click on the client computer you just backed up.

This will open your client’s backup properties dialog box. Highlight the backup you just created and select the ‘View details…’ button.

This will open the Backup Details dialog box for the backup you just created. You will see the description of the backup, which you can change if you would like, and a drop-down box that currently reads ‘Manage backup automatically’.

Click on the down arrow, select ‘Keep this backup’ and click OK.

That’s it, the backup you created will be kept indefinitely, or until you change this backup’s properties.

In the first part of this How To guide, we installed Windows Server Update Services on Windows Home Server 2011. Then in the second part, we set up our network computers to work with WSUS. With those two steps done, you can configure WSUS to support update delivery on your network computers.

Let’s start by logging on to your home server using a remote desktop connection. Now open the WSUS Administration Console. You can do this by clicking on ‘Windows Server Update Services‘ in the ‘Administrative Tools’ folder.

1. Set Up Your Computer Groups

This step will allow us to create a group policy for your computers. This policy will push updates to your computers based on the rules you create for each group. This could include a TEST group, DEV group, or a Home group – what you name the group should have meaning to understand the purpose of the group. You could have a PRODUCTION group, that will not push updates until you approve the updates. For my network, I created an ‘APPROVED-GRP’ where all of my network computers will have updates pushed automatically.

In the Left Pane, Open your Server, Open Computers, Open All Computers. Now click on the ‘Add Computer Group‘ in the Right pane.

Give your Group a name. I choose ‘Approved-Grp’. Now click Add.

This brings us back to the Admin Snap-in. Highlight the ‘Unassigned Computers‘ group, in the center pane, change the ‘Status‘ drop-down box to ‘Any’, and click the ‘Refresh‘ button.

Now, right-click on each computer and select ‘Change Membership‘ to move the computer to your automatic approval group.

Check the group to which you want to place the computer and click OK.

Click Refresh to see that your computers are no longer in the ‘Unassigned Computer’ group.

Highlight the ‘Approved-Grp’ group, and change the ‘Status‘ drop-down box to ‘Any‘, and click the ‘Refresh‘ button. Notice that your computers are now in the new group.

In the first part of this How To guide, we installed Windows Server Update Services on Windows Home Server 2011. Now it’s time to configure our network computers to work with WSUS. From there, in the final part of the series, we’ll complete our WSUS configuration on the server.

What You Will Need:

• Desktop or Laptop computer(s) with Windows Professional/Enterprise/Ultimate
• WHS 2011 with WSUS installed
• Your WHS Computer Name

Our Windows PCs normally look to Microsoft’s Update servers for their operating system patches. Now, we can use our home server to update all our Windows systems automatically.Perform this step on each of the computers you want to update from your home server.

When you launch the ‘Windows Update’ application, your computer connects to Microsoft’s update servers. Click on the Start button and open Windows Update in the Administrative folder. Look at the middle of the dialog box and note that MS provides your updates.

Close the ‘Update Windows’ window if you opened it.

Now let’s open the Group Policy Editor, (as mentioned above, this is only available on Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Windows). Click on the Start Orb and type ‘gpedit.msc‘. Now, in the left pane click on Computer Configuration, open Administrative Templates, open Windows Components, and open Windows Update folder. Now double click the ‘Specify Intranet Microsoft update service location‘ in the right pane.

Select the ‘Enabled‘ radio button. And put a description of what this will do in the Comment box. Now, Enter http://SERVER:8530 (replace SERVER with your own home server name) for both the ‘Set the intranet update service for detecting updates:’ and ‘Set the intranet statistics server:’ options,  Click OK.

Enable any additional settings you would like to apply. When finished close the GP editor.

If you open your Windows Update application now, you will notice it is now ‘Managed by your system administrator‘. Also, you can still update directly from Microsoft by clicking on the ‘Check online for updates option‘.

Update: If your version of Windows does not support Group Policy Edit, you can still connect to your WSUS server. In order to point your computer to the WSUS you will need to edit your registry. The following is for use with Windows 7 – at this point, it has not been tested with Windows Vista and XP. Use this at your own risk, no matter what OS you’re using! Registry Workaround

Repeat this process on all your home computers, and then move on to Part 3 for the final configuration steps on the server.

Are you responsible for the administration of your family’s computer systems? Would you like to push Microsoft’s OS updates to your home computers and reboot them automatically from a central location (like your server?)  If you answered yes to these questions, WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) may be the answer.

Because WSUS downloads Microsoft’s updates one time and stores them on your server, you will reduce your bandwidth usage. Additionally, once the updates have been stored on your home server, updating your computers will be much faster.

Difficulty: Advanced – Install at your own risk. Note that this is an unsupported scenario, so there is no official support available should your installation go awry. That said,  I personally installed WSUS twice on WHS 2011 without a problem, but your milage may vary.

What You Will Need

• RDP Connection
• Microsoft Report Viewer Redistributable 2008
• Windows Server Update Services 3.0 SP2

1. Download Applications

Let’s start by downloading and saving the two packages above to a shared folder on your home server.

2. Install Microsoft Report Viewer Redistributable 2008

We will install the MS Report Viewer Redistributable 2008 package on your server first. Log onto your server with a RDP connection. Navigate to the package and start to install it. Click Next.

Read and Check the License agreement and click Install.

Click finished. MS Report Viewer Redistributable 2008 is installed.

3. Install WSUS

Now, navigate to the WSUS install package it and start to install it. Click Next.

Installation Mode Selection. Select Full server installation and click Next.

There’s been much cooing across Windows enthusiast sites over the last few days with the leaking of a number of screenshots from an internal build of Windows 8 (8158). The screenshots outline the new Storage Spaces feature, previously disclosed by Microsoft earlier in the year. The leak has caused several commenters to proclaim the return of Windows Home Server’s v1′s Drive Extender feature, which may be true more in spirit than in architecture. But the more interesting question is whether the feature will be present in Windows 8 Server alone, or whether we’ll see improved storage pooling sneak into Windows 8 Client.

But first, a quick look at the screenshots reveals that Storage Spaces builds on much of the features already present in Windows’ Disk Management controls.  Two or more disks of varying sizes can be pooled to create a Storage Space, which is given a name and a drive letter. Two levels of fault tolerance are catered for – a standard 2 Way Mirror, which stores two copies of files and can tolerate a single disk failure and a 3 Way Mirror, which obviously takes up of your storage pool capacity, but can tolerate two disk failures for added protection.

A Storage Space can be provisioned that is greater than the size of your storage pool – when capacity runs low, the idea is that you’ll be advised to go grab a larger/additional hard drive to create more capacity.

The most interesting aspect of Storage Spaces is not so much was it is, but where it will be deployed. Up to now, the assumption has been that Storage Spaces would be a feature restricted to Windows 8 Server, as most of the discussion from Microsoft has come from the corporation’s Server team. Whilst it’s unclear whether the screenshots are taken from the Client or Server edition of Windows 8, the emerging view is that Storage Spaces may well drop into some of the high-end client SKUs. Add improved backup and remote access features (we know the former is due for a refresh, who knows about the latter) and your next Home Server may well be a Client. Note that Microsoft haven’t commented on Storage Spaces appearing in Windows client at this point, so it’s all (fun) conjecture.

For those seeking more on Storage Spaces, the feature was explained over on Microsoft’s Server and Cloud Platform Team Blog last month.

As briefly introduced in Bill Laing’s post, Storage Spaces enable a diverse set of customers ranging from enthusiasts (such as Bill) to enterprises and hosting entities, to easily deploy continuously available cost-effective storage using commodity components. Storage Spaces were designed to be highly scalable supporting deployments ranging from just a few terabytes to multiple petabytes. Supported disk connectivity options include SATA (Serial ATA) and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) – the latter option is expected to be more widely utilized in business environments. Features include:

 

• Optimal and flexible storage utilization through thin-provisioning and trim support
• Easy (elastic) capacity expansion – simply add more drives to the pool
• Resiliency to physical disk failures – high-performance mirroring (two or three copies), or parity based redundancy (with integrated journaling), is combined with rapid recovery and integrated per-pool hot-spares. As a result, despite storage hardware failures, applications and associated services can continue operating. Proactive background scrubbing further assists in minimizing possibility of downtime despite media failures.
• Application driven seamless error correction – some enterprise-class applications have traditionally maintained data checksums (or equivalent) enabling them to auto-detect data corruptions. Such applications can now be enhanced to (also) intelligently auto-correct and, thereby, seamlessly recover from data corruptions. This is enabled by an API which supports rendering all mirrored copies consistent from an application-determined “correct copy”.
• Pools can be comprised of heterogeneous media types (SSDs, or various HDDs e.g. 15K RPM, 10K RPM, or 7200 RPM) and space allocation can be targeted to specific underlying media for optimal performance.
• Ease of management via integration with the new Windows Storage Management API (see Windows 8 Platform Storage – Part 2) and full PowerShell support. The ability to delegate administration per-pool and per-space enables multi-tenant deployments.
• Continuously available and scale-out deployments through integration with Failover Clustering as well as with Cluster Shared Volumes. Note that clustered deployments require fixed provisioning.

 

In a nutshell, Storage Spaces deliver scale, availability, data integrity, and high performance on commodity hardware without “breaking the bank”.

So, was Drive Extender killed to make way for Storage Spaces? Has Windows Home Server been benched to get out of the way of the Windows 8 juggernaut? Who needs a separate Server SKU for consumers if your consumer OS has all of the functionality packed in? Your thoughts and conspiracy theories please….

Whether Windows 8 Client (or Server, for that matter) can do as good a job as a home server as Windows Home Server remains to be seen – certainly we’d wish to see improvements to backup and remote access in Windows 8 before making a judgement – but it’s something we’ll be keeping a close eye on in the coming months.

LDisk for Windows Home Server v1 and Windows Home Server 2011 adds iSCSI Target Storage capability to your Windows Home Server. Using LDisk, you can create a single appliance to provide all your storage and backup needs.

Features:

• iSCSI Target Storage for Windows Home Server
• IP SAN (Storage Area Network)- Block transfer
• iSCSI SAN interface over Ethernet
• Snapshot with schedules, revert, and convert to volume
• Fully protected data using SAN Volume duplication
• Supports all Internal or external drives
• Drive Extender for WHS 2011
• Storage Expansion through iSCSI for WHS 2011

v2.0.3 of the beta add-in has been released this week. What’s new?

• Auto-refresh in iSCSI Tabs. That make your life a little easier that you do not have to click refresh moving around tabs. Auto-refresh for NAS tabs will be included in next release.
• A change related to Virtual Disks.
• A correction in capacity calculation in iSCSI volumes tab.

The company’s website has also been updated with a full explanation of iSCSI and IP SAN technology – well worth a read.

Download: LDisk for Windows Home Server v1 | Windows Home Server 2011

Experience Level: Medium

LDisk for Windows Home Server v1 and Windows Home Server 2011 adds iSCSI Target Storage capability to your Windows Home Server. Using LDisk, you can create a single appliance to provide all your storage and backup needs.

Features:

• iSCSI Target Storage for Windows Home Server
• IP SAN (Storage Area Network)- Block transfer
• iSCSI SAN interface over Ethernet
• Snapshot with schedules, revert, and convert to volume
• Fully protected data using SAN Volume duplication
• Supports all Internal or external drives
• Drive Extender for WHS 2011
• Storage Expansion through iSCSI for WHS 2011

The add-in is currently in beta with final pricing yet to be announced.

Developer: InteliSAN

Download: LDisk for Windows Home Server v1 | Windows Home Server 2011

Release History

v0.2.0.0.5 (27th December 2011)

• Progress bar for iSCSI Expansion tab
• Name changes: Snapspace management, Rescan Disks
• Added Max size to Volumes create popup
• More clear disk name, location, and status
• To correct disk Add when all disks were not initialized
• To correct mirror volume delete
• Better error handling after disk failures
• To correct GUI issues with no disks in the system

v0.2.0.0.4 (12th December 2011)

• Major improvement to Disk Pooling / Drive Extender. With this change, you can create one storage pool, and serve iSCSI or NAS volumes from the same storage pool. Only one disk is needed for both NAS and SAN volumes.
• Combining all LDisk tabs under one main Tab to simplifies use of the product.

v0.2.3 (23rd November 2011)

• Auto-refresh in iSCSI Tabs. That make your life a little easier that you do not have to click refresh moving around tabs. Auto-refresh for NAS tabs will be included in next release.
• A change related to Virtual Disks. Their behavior is listed in Note #5 in email below.
• A correction in capacity calculation in iSCSI volumes tab.

v0.1 (16th November 2011)

• Beta release