A New Kind of Home Computer: Windows Home Server Preview
by Ryan Smith on September 4, 2007 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Systems
WHS As A Backup Suite, Cont
As for restoring data, WHS comes with two options. The first is the traditional per-file restore, which can only be handled by a client. When a user/client wants to restore a file, they will pick the date/backup from which they want to restore the file, at which point the connector software will mount a dynamically-generated volume that is the contents of the client as of that backup. At this point the user can copy over files from the backup volume to their hard drive.
For a more complete restore, such as in the case of a catastrophic failure or those looking to use WHS as an image backup server, WHS ships with a live-restore CD. When the restore CD is inserted into a computer, the affected machine can connect to the WHS server and select a whole backup to restore. Since the operating system is included in the backup, it is also included in the restore, returning the machine to the same state it was in as of the backup. This process does however wipe the client's hard drive in the process, so it's not something that can be used leisurely. Power users that will be using it as a way to image and restore machines will especially appreciate the ability to restore to volumes of arbitrary size, and while Microsoft isn't pushing the imaging ability hard, it's one the best features of WHS.
There are a few caveats with the backup features of WHS that bear mentioning however. First and foremost only machines running Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista x86 can be backed up. Older versions of Windows are not supported, and more surprisingly x64 versions of Windows are not supported. The WHS development team has cited the need to write drivers for the backup/restore abilities as the reason for the latter limitation, as they did not have the time to write a good set of drivers for both x86 and x64, so x64 support is not included for now. Unfortunately we don't have a good idea when such support will arrive; the development team for WHS is working on writing a version of the software for x64, but they are not saying when it might be ready.
Hardware constraints also need to be considered. Backups are transfer intensive, so anything less than a gigabit Ethernet link will cause the network to be the bottleneck. This is especially problematic for wireless links, which under 802.11g are practically capped to less than 6MB/sec (and realistically top out at under 4MB/sec), a fraction of the transfer rate of a hard drive. Microsoft highly recommends at least a 100Mb Ethernet link (forgoing a recommendation for wireless entirely), but wireless will work at the cost of being especially slow when WHS needs to do another full backup because it is ready to throw out the old one.
Last, there is the issue of doing backups at convenient times. A machine needs to be fully-on to be backed up, and WHS only has a limited ability to deal with AWOL machines and deal with machines that aren't currently on; it (or rather the connector) can wake up sleeping computers, but does not have a wake-on-LAN feature for waking up computers that are shut off entirely. An add-on exists that can handle this, but the only reliable way of backing up a machine at night is to leave it on or put it to sleep instead of turning it off. Sleeping however can be more problematic on an enthusiast computer than an OEM-built one.
With that said, it's very clear that Microsoft has put a lot of thought and their best technologies into the backup feature of WHS. Although this isn't a round up where we can adequately and fairly compare all the major backup software suites, we will say that we're very impressed with what WHS can do here. The backup features alone can sell WHS if the price is right as is the number of machines.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
128 Comments
View All Comments
mindless1 - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
Surely the backup client can be disabled (On one of the two)? I would be very surprised if 2 WHS systems can't coexist given a configuration change if you just wanted to avoid the wasted redundancy of having both make backups. That is, unless MS had deliberately chosen to prevent the two from getting along.ATWindsor - Tuesday, September 4, 2007 - link
Does it souppert proper raid, like raid 5 for instance? That fits my use a bit better than this duplication of files. WHS looks interesting, but seemingly a bit to primitive to be honest, seems to be missing quite a few more or less nescessary features.Rolphus - Tuesday, September 4, 2007 - link
The choice of OS should be entirely separate to RAID considerations. Software RAID5 is a bit of a waste of time, seeing as any performance advantage over just mirroring the data would be more than offset by software parity calculations. I don't see any reason why a BIOS-level RAID system (as supplied by many high-end and server motherboards and add-in cards) wouldn't be supported by WHS; Windows 2003 Server supports any RAID level you care to throw at it.mindless1 - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
Most people won't care about parity calculation overhead, it's not as though the system is being used like a PC or workstation, that's practically ALL the system would be doing besides sitting idle, particularly given the rough spec of a 1GHz or more processor which is not at all needed just to serve files. Maybe with GbE, you might want a 300-400MHz processor to keep networking performance good but on a system that old you'd probably be bottlenecked by the PCI bus before anything else.yyrkoon - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
What is wrong with software RAID, if that is all the system does(server storage) ? In my book, implementing *any* so called server OS *needs* to have at least RAID1, and should have RAID5 in software. If not, there is not realy reason to stop using WinXP Pro, with a few registry hacks tp bypass the RAID5 limitation.Anyhow, why pay for something that is lacking when you can get an OS that does it for free, or another earlier version of windows that will do it with a few hacks, and yu're already familiar with.
As I said in an earlier post, I used WHS for a few days several months ago(early beta program), and did not like what I saw. So . . .
ATWindsor - Wednesday, September 5, 2007 - link
Software raid5 can have very good performance, modern computers are fast, besides the main consideration is not wasting so much space, if you want to have som security for your files, you get by on loosing 1/4 insted of 1/2 of the space.The main advantage off WHS is the whole storage-pool-setup, I hope they implment somethin similar in w2k3.
Gholam - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
I tested software RAID5 on an nForce4 SLI motherboard (DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR) with Silicon Image 3114 chip and 4x WD 500GB drives. Reads were in 11-14MB/s range, writes sub-10MB/s, and CPU load was near full, on an Athlon 64 4000+.ATWindsor - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
Try to test a proper software-raid, instead of the inbuilt nforce-crap, just because you tested a poor solution doesn't make all solutions bad.Gholam - Sunday, September 9, 2007 - link
It's not nForce, it's SiI3114, nearly ubiquitous on higher-end motherboards of that era, as well as present on many lower-end PCI cards. Building RAID5 on an "affordable" solution from Silicon Image, Promise and such will give you exactly that kind of performance, as well as guarantee a high probability of data loss due to driver/firmware bug. In order to run RAID5 you need a proper controller from Adaptec/LSI Logic/3Ware, and that costs big bucks.Ryan Smith - Tuesday, September 4, 2007 - link
It only supports proper RAID if you can configure it all in the BIOS. Any kind of softRAID that needs Windows' help isn't supported. Basically it needs to appear as 1 disk to Windows.