Windows Home Server Kevin Royalty – SBS MVP Total Care Computer Consulting, LLC [email protected] A few questions … • Do you have broadband at home? • Do you have 2 or more PCs at home? • Do you have important “stuff” on your PCs? • How often do you backup your home computers? What monetary value would you put on your documents, photos, videos, digital music and the time it took to setup all of your PCs? 2 Who needs a home server? Households with Broadband and 2 or more PCs USA: 18+ M, Globally: 50+ M and growing Region 2005 2009 USA 15.5 23.4 Asia/Pacific 12.9 26.6 Western Europe 11.4 21.7 Rest of World 2.2 7.4 Totals 42.1 79.2 Source: IDC – Worldwide Home Networking 32006 -2010 Forecast (#203605) Who is the customer? 2 Distinct Personas Oliver - the “Enthusiast” / Early adopter Jeff - “Likes technology when it works” Goals Excite the “Olivers” Ensure the “Jeffs” can be successful Incredibly powerful, yet easy-to use (simple) 4 Enabling the Platform for the Home Windows Home Server helps you simplify the way you keep and share your family’s photos, videos and music, by providing a familiar, easy and reliable way to protect, connect, and organize what’s most important 7 Windows Home Server Key Theme: Connecting Your Family Windows Home Server helps you simplify the way you keep and share your family’s photos, videos and music, by providing a familiar, easy and reliable way to protect, connect, and organize what’s most important Protect Connect Organize Grow With Windows® With Windows Windows Home Windows Home Home Server your Home Server you Server simplifies Server easily family’s files and can connect to your family’s expands so it will computers are your family’s documents, grow with you as backed up documents, photos, videos your needs grow. automatically photos, videos and music, every day, so you and music storing them in can have peace of virtually wherever one shared mind. you are. location. Analyst Comments The New Digital Home Home Server Laptop Xbox 360 Media Center PC Internet 10 Hardware Concepts Hardware Partners To date these partners have announced intentions to launch a Windows Home Server powered product Additionally, there are 30+ hardware partners who are evaluating Windows Home Server 12 Day 1 Experience Connect and Power On Install the Windows Home Server Connector software 7 Simple Steps Technical Details V1 Design Decisions • Limit the number of “Knobs & Buttons” – Fewer options are better – make the product as easy-to-use as possible • Focus on end-to-end scenarios driven from customer research findings – Don’t try to do 1000+ little things … • No Active Directory / Group Policy – Consumers have Windows XP Home, Windows Vista Home Basic and Home Premium that cannot “join a domain” 16 Home Server Connector Establishes relationship between home computer and home server – Automated Backup Configuration – Password Synchronization – Tray Icon Health Notifications – Security Center Health Reporting (Windows Vista) – Checks to see if Connector software is up-to-date and using the same version as the Windows Home Server software version 17 Home Server Tray Icon 18 Home Server Connector Tips • 1:1 relationship between PC and home server – Re-install Connector or run Discovery.EXE to establish a new relationship from a home PC to your home server • Password synchronization – Notifies user if password on home PC and password on the home server for a given user are not the same 19 Windows Home Server Console • Accessible from any home PC • Easy to setup & configure your home server • Tab-based, acronym free user interface • Server Settings for system-wide options • Built-in Password Recovery option • Extensible – new tabs & server settings 20 Home Server Console Tips • Only trusted people should know the Windows Home Server Console password • Maximum number of users is 10 + Guest • Logon names on Home Server should be the same names used on the Home Computers – On Windows PCs, user can change the ‘description’ of the user without changing the underlying logon name • Uses Remote Desktop – Enables reuse of Windows Server UI components 22 Automated Backup Benefits • Automated Daily Image-based Backups – Supports up to 10 PCs running Windows XP or Vista • Simple to Restore an Entire PC • Simple to Restore individual files & folders • Uses very little disk space on your home server – Each unique cluster across all PCs is stored once – Home Server keeps track of which PCs had each cluster for each backup date & time 23 24 How Automated Backup Works 1. When a computer is backed up, a snapshot (VSS) is taken of each volume that is configured for backup 2. The client software then determines which clusters (typically 4KB in size) on the volume have changed since the last backup. 3. A hash is calculated for each changed cluster and sent to the Home Server. 4. The server performs a lookup into the central backup database to determine if this cluster is already being stored. 5. If the cluster does NOT exist in the backup database, the server asks the client component to send the entire cluster. Otherwise, the location of the cluster in this snapshot is recorded and on to the next cluster … 6. This is repeated until all changed clustered on the client PC have been evaluated. 25 26 Backup Data is Stored Once First home computer is backed up and data is stored on home server. If the 2nd PC has similar data, then the home server will not store a 2nd copy. Only unique data on 2nd PC needs to be transferred to home server Each night, home server stores only 1 copy of each unique cluster that is found across all of the home computers. 27 Restore Entire PC 1. Windows Home Server ships with Home Computer Restore CD 2. CD contains WinPE plus the Windows Home Server Restore Home Computer wizard • Can be used to restore all hard drives from a given backup or simply select a subset of the hard drives to restore • Can be used to restore the primary hard drive to a larger disk if the primary hard drive fails 3. User needs to answer a few simple questions and the restore process begins 28 Restore Files & Folders 1. Open Windows Home Server Console 2. View Backup Details for a given PC 3. Click Open… to create a view into what that hard drive looked like at that date & time • Virtual Disk Driver that creates a Read/Only view displayed in Windows Explorer from the data on Windows Home Server 4. User can drag and drop files & folders from the Windows Explorer window to their PC desktop 29 Automated Backup Tips • Turn Off Backups for PCs that you don‟t want to backup automatically • Remove PC will remove a PC that no longer exists from the Windows Home Server Console and all backups will be deleted • Set a reasonable number of backups to keep, e.g. last 24 months, last 5 weeks, last 7 days • Backup Cleanup is run once per week 30 Drive Extender Benefits • Easy to add additional hard drives – Internal or External hard drives – Any size hard drive (from 40 GB to 1+ TB) • Redundancy at the „Shared Folder‟ level – Protects against hard drive failure • Easy to remove older hard drives – Windows Home Server will move the data off of the hard drive to other hard drives on the home server • Simplified Management – Add, Remove, Repair • Previous Versions enabled for Shared Folders 31 32 33 Drive Letters are Not Needed Windows Home Server Drive Extender creates Windows Home Server a single storage pool from multiple disks: hides the complexity of volumes and disk allocation. Users simply create shared folders: SATA (100GB) USB (80GB) SCSI (500GB) 1394 (350GB) \\Server\Music \\Server\Photos \\Server\Videos \\Server\Software \\Server\Public 1030GB 34 Shared Folder Duplication A new photo is saved to the Photos shared \\Server\Photos folder on the Home Server Flowers.jpg The Drive Extender file system filter creates the reparse point (pointer) for the new file and determines onto which disk the data should be stored Within a couple of minutes, the drive extender service will create a duplicate copy of the file and update the reparse point to include the second location. 35 Balancing Disk Space Usage A Windows Home Server with two disks that is nearing capacity: User adds disks The Windows Home Server Drive Extender service balances the files across the new disks: 36 Remote Access Benefits • Access to Shared Folders on home server • Integrated Search for quickly finding files/folders • Remote Desktop Access to Home PCs – Windows XP Professional, XP Media Center, and XP Tablet editions – Windows Vista Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise • Personalized internet domain from Windows Live – <your_name>.HomeServer.com • Built-in Dynamic DNS services • UPnP based Port Forwarding configuration tool for broadband routers 37 38 How Remote Access Works 1. Remote Access is off by default. The home server owner needs to configure it via Server Settings in the Windows Home Server Console 2. Windows Home Server will attempt to forward the following TCP ports from your broadband router to your home server • Port 80 – Web Access via http://<your_name>.homeserver.com/home • Port 443 – Remote Access Login page via https://<your_name>.homeserver.com/remote • Port 4125 – Remote Desktop proxy – so you can remotely connect to your home PCs that support Remote Desktop 3. Enable Remote Desktop on your home PCs so they are remotely accessible 4. Remote Access is granted per user, and each user that has remote access enabled needs a strong password Note: You cannot use the ‘Administrator’ account to logon remotely 5.