Microsoft Windows Home Server 2011 64-bit - OEM

Pros: Highly recommended product! Makes incremental backups of all your computers every night. This feature has saved me so many times! Allows easy sharing like NAS to your whole household. I use it as a media server for all my Windows Media Center PCs connected to TVs. The remote login from the web is incredible as well. The price is so good when comparing to Windows Server Essentials! Just slap this OS on some old unwanted PC you have laying around, and instantly your home network rocks!

Cons: Microsoft is no longer developing the product. You can still get windows updates and such, but there won't be any future feature packs released.

Check Disk Management on each client PC to verify whether they have an EFI partition on them. If they do, WHS2011 cannot back them up directly. You can set BitLocker or another backup program to backup the PC to the server, but the built in software won't work. I had an HP built PC that would fail all backups at 1% until I deleted a hidden 100MB EFI partition.

Overall Review: Once you start backing everything up and serving media, you quickly realize that HDDs are expensive.

These machines automatically perform incremental backups every night at my house:
-Win7 Home Premium 64 bit Laptop
-Win7 Home Premium 64 bit Desktop x2
-Win7 Home Premium 64 bit Nettop
-Win7 Enterprise 64 bit Laptop
-Win8 Pro 64 bit Desktop
-The server itself gets backed up to another drive

Pros: It keeps administration simple. More flexible than NAS firmware (although several of them are worth a look). Inexpensive solution as long as you have existing hardware.

Cons: WHS 2011 support seems to be diminishing. They tote the WHS app plug-in feature, but no one is really coding anything new or support for the old ones for some time.

I’m not crazy about the client connector. I haven’t quite figured out a seamless authentication method. I have to log in to access a file share every time I reboot, but it maintains the authorization after that.

It is 2008 R2, it’s not 2008 R2, it is 2008 R2… That’s my way of saying you get a restricted MS Server 2008 R2 install with some benefits, but many server grade features not available. Other software packages like anti-virus or backup software won’t install because it recognizes it as 2008 R2 and so you have to pay serious dollars for their enterprise version. Minimize the software execution to known products and you should be ok without anti-virus. WHS comes with backup software, but I prefer real-time backups.

Overall Review: I do wish a limited form of active directory was available so that I can configure my clients to use the account created on the WHS rather than having a PC account and a server account. At this point, if I had to do it all over again I would probably choose WHS 2011 still because of my fear of a proprietary NAS firmware becoming unsupported. However, WHS 2011 support enthusiasm isn’t high and I may end up with the same problem.

You will need to be tech savvy to do features that aren’t in the dashboard, i.e. setting up your own BitTorrent server, etc.