Windows Home Server 2007 is a home server operating system made by Microsoft. Announced on January 7, 2007, it was officially released to manufacturing on July 16, 2007, and released to retail on November 4, 2007. Windows Home Server 2007 is based on Windows Server 2003 R2, and is intended to be a solution for homes with multiple connected PCs to offer file sharing, automated backups, print server, and remote access.
An interesting note is that Windows Home Server 2007's updates are called Power Packs, instead of Service Packs. Power Pack 1 was released on July 20, 2008, Power Pack 2 was released on March 24, 2009, and Power Pack 3, the last Power Pack, was released on November 24, 2009. Windows Home Server 2007 was succeeded by Windows Home Server 2011 on April 6, 2011. Microsoft has sadly confirmed that Windows Home Server 2011 will be the last in the Windows Home Server series.
Features
The configuration interface is designed to be user friendly enough that it can be set up without prior knowledge of server administration. The configuration interface, called the
Home Server Console, is delivered as a
Remote Desktop Protocol application to remote PCs - while the application runs on the server itself, the UI is rendered on the remote system. The Home Server Console client application can be accessed from any Windows PC. The server itself requires no video card or peripherals; it is designed to require only an
Ethernetcard and at least one
Windows XP,
Windows Vista or
Windows 7 computer.
Drive Extender
Windows Home Server Drive Extender was a file-based replication system that provided three key capabilities:
- Multi-disk redundancy so that if any given disk failed, data was not lost
- Arbitrary storage expansion by supporting any type of hard disk drive (Serial ATA, USB,FireWire etc.) in any mixture and capacity — similar in concept to JBOD
- A single folder namespace (no drive letters)
With drive extender, users could add larger capacity hard disk drives and then could offline lesser capacity drives to upgrade capacity inline. For example if the user was reaching capacity of the share with 5 Terabyte of the 6 Terabyte capacity used with 6 one Terabyte drives then the user could offline one of the 1 Terabyte drives and physically replace it with a 2 Terabyte drive. The WHS automatically equalizes the redistribution of used space across all available drives on a regular basis. The offline process would compress the used data across the minimum amount of drives allowing for the removal of one of the lesser capacity drives. Once replaced with a drive of higher capacity the system will automatically redistribute used capacity among the pool to ensure space capacity on each drive.
Users (specifically those who configure a family's home server) dealt with storage at two levels:
Shared Folders and Disks. The only concepts relevant regarding disks was whether they had been "added" to the home server's storage pool or not and whether the disk appeared healthy to the system or not. This was in contrast with Windows'
Logical Disk Manager which requires a greater degree of technical understanding in order to correctly configure a
RAID array.
Shared Folders had a name, a description, permissions, and a flag indicating whether duplication (redundancy) was on or off for that folder.
If duplication was on for a Shared Folder (which was the default on multi-disk Home Server systems and not applicable to single disk systems) then the files in that Shared Folder were duplicated and the effective storage capacity was halved. However, in situations where a user may not have wanted data duplicated (e.g. TV shows that had been archived to a Windows Home Server from a system running
Windows Media Center), Drive Extender provided the capability to not duplicate such files if the server was short on capacity or manually mark a complete content store as not for duplication.
A known limitation of Drive Extender was that it in some cases changed date/timestamp of directories and files when data was moved around between disks. According to Microsoft this was expected behaviour. This caused unexpected behaviour when using clients that sort media based on date. Examples are
XBMC,
MediaPortal, and
Squeezebox Server. The aforementioned programs worked fine with WHS; however, files may have appeared out of order due to this caveat.
Computer Backup
Windows Home Server Computer Backup automatically backs up all of the computers in a home to the server using an image-based system that ensures point-in-time-based restoration of either entire PCs or specific files and folders. Complete
bare-metal restores are initiated through a restore
bootable CD, file based restores are initiated through the WHS client software which allows the users to open a backup and "drag and drop" files from it. This technology uses
Volume Shadow Services (VSS) technology on the client computer to take an image based backup of a running computer. Because the backup operates on data at the
cluster level,
single instancing can be performed to minimize the amount of data that travels over the network and that will ultimately be stored on the home server. This single instancing gives the server the ability to store only one instance of data, no matter if the data originated from another computer, another file, or even data within the same file.
Computer backup images are not duplicated on the server, so if a server hard drive fails, backups could be lost. The "Server Backup" feature added in Power Pack 1 does not include duplication of backup images.
Remote File Access
The system also offers an SSL secured web browserbased interface over the Internet to the shared file stores. The release version offers access to the web interface via a free Windows Live-provided URL, which uses Dynamic DNS. The web interface also allows the uploading to and downloading of files from the content stores. However, there is a limit of 2 GB for a single batch of upload.
Add-Ins
Windows Home Server allows for developers to publish community and commercial add-ins designed to enhance the Windows Home Server with added functionality. As of January 2010, nearly 100 of these add-ins have been developed for WHS, including applications for antivirus & security, backups, disk management, automation, media, network/power management, remote access, BitTorrent and more. The Windows Home Server SDK (Software Development Kit) provides developers with a set of APIs and tools to use when developing for and extending Windows Home Server.
Downloads
Windows Home Server 2007 (English) (torrent)
After that you can just put the files on a Floppy disk or a CD-ROM and install Windows Home Server 2007 on a computer, or you can use
Virtualbox to emulate it.
Windows Home Server 2007 and all of its versions requires a serial key to operate fully. You may use the software for 180 days, after which a product key is required.
NOTICE!!! If you want a product key you'll have to buy Windows Home Server 2007. We cannot provide product keys legally on this site. If you need a product key for the installation, please Google! Thanks! :)
Info
Developed by: Microsoft Corporation
Release date: November 4, 2007
Latest version: 6.0 (Released in November 24, 2009)
Source model: Shared source
License: Proprietary commercial software
Succeeded by: Windows Home Server 2011 (in 2011)
Support status: Unsupported as of January 8, 2013.
System requirements:
1.0 GHz Intel Pentium III or higher
512 MB of RAM or higher
80 GB hard drive
DVD drive
100 Mbit/s Ethernet (recommended)
Mouse and Keyboard
Recommended Downloadable programs
Windows Home Server 2007 can download programs. You can click on the links below and simply put the files on your floppy disk or CD-Rom.
Screenshots
