We have had Windows Home Server 2008 in our action pack for quite a while now but haven’t really paid much attention to it, so I decided to see if it links in with Media Centre and what exactly it can do, with the release of Power Pack 2 for Home Server, Microsoft have added the ability for it to link with Media Centre i would have thought this would have been a good idea from the outset but never mind the facility is there now.
I installed Home Sever into a vm on my Hyper-V machine all went very smoothly as expected because Home Server seems to be a modified version of SBS 2003 without Exchange 2003 but with some added extras such as a backup facility that will automatically backup any machine that you connect to the server.
It also unique way of pooling hard drives to make it look like they are part of one big drive a bit like raid but not redundant by default, although you can add extra drives to act as secondary drives so the server can create automatic backups of your files.
Now depending on how many files you have and how many pc’s you have being backed up as you can imagine this can start to use a lot of storage but adding extra storage is easy enough you just put the new drive into the system or plug in an external drive and add it to the pool, the server sorts the rest out.
I have decided to use Home Server as my main media server for my home mainly because of the storage pool and the client computer backup facility now that it integrates with media centre