Why WHS?

[mtyme]

It's not difficult to get your hands on free legal licenses. Being or knowing a student in any form will most likely give you that luxury. Oddly enough, WHS is not included in that list of software lol.

My current issue is that I have 3 servers in my basement sucking down power that I want to consolidate. I like the interface and what I believe WHS can do but I need it to do more than run sage and do drive pooling. I just need to do more reading.

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by mtyme

It's not difficult to get your hands on free legal licenses. Being or knowing a student in any form will most likely give you that luxury. Oddly enough, WHS is not included in that list of software lol.

My current issue is that I have 3 servers in my basement sucking down power that I want to consolidate. I like the interface and what I believe WHS can do but I need it to do more than run sage and do drive pooling. I just need to do more reading.

What functions are you trying to consolidate? There might be a possibility of all of those being doable on a WHS.

[frontlinegeek]

If it makes you feel good for the possibilities...

I have recently repurposed a pile of hardware and reinstalled my WHS box and it is also acting as a SageTV server/client for my 1080p TV in the bedroom.

• Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-US2H
• Athlon X2 4000+
• 2 GB DDR2-667

This and 5 HDDs and a DVD ROM are doing the following:

• SageTV Server
• SageTV Client
• Backups of PCs on the LAN
• General file serving
• Juice RSS feed downloads
• uTorrent

Sage is also running the BMT package and doing full library metadata upkeep. Everything runs just peachy keen with no issues to speak of.

To get around the MCE remote I was using not working 100% on WHS, I ordered an USB-UIRT and that has solved that issue completely.

[mtyme]

Originally Posted by mikejaner

What functions are you trying to consolidate? There might be a possibility of all of those being doable on a WHS.

I've got a linux server that's my web/email/ftp host, another linux machine that's my NAS box with software based RAID 5, and of course the sage server. I know enough about linux to be dangerous (to myself).

I've had my web/mail/ftp server up and running for a long time - it's still on a celeron 1 ghz with 512mb of ram. It's rock solid, I forget it's there sometimes.

The NAS server has been up and running for over a year and a half. I haven't done much with it but I had a drive go bad a couple days ago and getting the array fixed hasn't been fun.

Edit: I can do these things with linux, one of my problems is that once I get NAS or web server set I never need to go back to it unless there's a problem. And by that time, I've forgotten everything I knew when I set it up because I don't use it on a daily basis LOL.

[frontlinegeek]

Originally Posted by mtyme

Edit: I can do these things with linux, one of my problems is that once I get NAS or web server set I never need to go back to it unless there's a problem. And by that time, I've forgotten everything I knew when I set it up because I don't use it on a daily basis LOL.

LOL!!! That happens to me at work all the time!!!

But looking at what you are doing and that you would like to consolidate all or most of that, there is no reason that you cannot put that all on a WHS based server.

People like to take shots at Windows but in reality, it is a lot more stable than people like to give it credit for. My average uptime % at work for my W2K3 servers is 99.9%. The only reason it is not higher is from the need of some patches to reboot the server. I have one W2K3 server that hits 99.99% which is less than 1 hour a year of downtime.

Also take note that WHS has a web serving feature built in so that you can share your files out to the internets. And where WHS is basically W2K3 Server, anything for W2K3S, for the most part, will install on WHS. So that means e-mail serving and the whole shot.

[Skirge01]

That's a good point. You said that you want to run a web/mail/ftp server. What exactly are you doing with them? Are you truly hosting your own email server and websites? Or, do you simply want to be able to serve up shared files from your home computers, access SageTV for remote scheduling (etc), and remote into your computers? If it's the latter, then WHS can definitely handle all of that.

[mtyme]

It's a true hosting server visible to the outside world. I have a dedicated IP address to my house and the related port requests are routed directly to my older linux box which houses my web sites and the sites of a couple family members as well as serving up email and FTP access for them.

If you were to run a paid web hosting service, this is a solution one might use.

[lpitman]

What about WHS as File Server, SageTV Server, Backup Server, and HomeSeer (Home Automation) Server? Any using this combination?

[frontlinegeek]

One thing that you can always look at doing is loading up the RAM to the max 4 GB for WHS and then installing VMware Server 2.0 (Free to use) on it so you can then host a linux environment in a VM and still run things the way that you are used to doing.

This also leads you down the route of if your greatest concern is reducing the number of PCs that are running 24/7, you could always invest in a quad core 64 bit platform (ESXi NEEDS a 64 bit CPU) from AMD or Intel and then install ESXi 4.0 (Also free to use) and then install separate VMs for each major function that you want to host. Where ESXi has very broad overall hardware virtualization support, if you needed Sage to manage tuner cards, you should be able to access them from the VM.

Going the ESXi Route, at the least, would allow you to consolidate as many of your currently separate PCs into one machine. If that means that you put all your Linux stuff onto ESXi and then build a separate WHS box for general file serving and SageTV serving, then at least you are down to only needing two machines.

A few extra things to take note of...

ESXi 4.0 supports iSCSI and FreeNAS will run in iSCSI mode so you can do all kinds of interesting setups so that your storage is separate from your actual VM host machine.

[frontlinegeek]

Originally Posted by lpitman

What about WHS as File Server, SageTV Server, Backup Server, and HomeSeer (Home Automation) Server? Any using this combination.

See my comments above. I run more than this but no automation and it works perfectly.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by que3jxp

One thing that you can always look at doing is loading up the RAM to the max 4 GB for WHS and then installing VMware Server 2.0 (Free to use) on it so you can then host a linux environment in a VM and still run things the way that you are used to doing.

Unless you have a Hauppauge PVR-150 tuner - it doesn't like 4GB of RAM! I built a new server last December and everything worked perfectly except for the PVR-150. Hauppauge cards don't like 4GB or more of memory so I had to pull out a 2GB stick of memory.

[frontlinegeek]

Originally Posted by wayner

Unless you have a Hauppauge PVR-150 tuner - it doesn't like 4GB of RAM!

Well doesn't that suck!!! And I own a couple of those!

[wayner]

Originally Posted by que3jxp

Well doesn't that suck!!! And I own a couple of those!

Totally - here is a thread that discusses the issue.