Microsoft Discontinues Windows Home Server

[ViRGE]

http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows-server/rip-windows-home-server-143619

It was a good idea, I’ll say that. But Windows Home Server (WHS) never really caught on with consumers for a variety of perfectly legitimate reasons, and when the most recent (and just second) version of the product appeared last year sans Drive Extender, I suspected, like many others, that the end was near. Today, it’s official: Windows Home Server has been cancelled by Microsoft.

Well crud.

 

[Dulanic]

Original worked great. 2011 was severely lacking so I kind of expected this.

 

[Paperlantern]

There just arent that many geeks wanting to run home servers. I do but I set mine up before WHS even came out and I never wanted to switch. Server 2003 does the job for everything I need right now as a FTP/File/Print server. In all reality what I do have here (and what MOST people's "home servers" are) can be done with Windows 7 or even Windows XP... So this doesn't surprise me. I'd imagine someone, after buying a new PC will have that leftover Win XP box from 5 years ago and if they WANTED to build a home server, would just slap everything they need on that box.

 

[lxskllr]

There just arent that many geeks wanting to run home servers. I do but I set mine up before WHS even came out and I never wanted to switch. Server 2003 does the job for everything I need right now as a FTP/File/Print server. In all reality what I do have here (and what MOST people's "home servers" are) can be done with Windows 7 or even Windows XP... So this doesn't surprise me. I'd imagine someone, after buying a new PC will have that leftover Win XP box from 5 years ago and if they WANTED to build a home server, would just slap everything they need on that box.

Seems like that was maybe a marketing problem. I don't go in electronic stores much, but I never heard of WHS anywhere but tech forums. Prebuilts seemed like half--hearted attempts. Who wouldn't want their machines backed up to a central location, with an easy media server? Put it in a nice looking box, sell it at a good price, and tell people why they want it. They needed to market it to non-techies, and I didn't see that.

 

[Gunbuster]

cloud storage, cloud backup, app store, buying music and movies online.

WHS was not aligned with any of that. Makes perfect sense for MS to dump it.

 

[n0x1ous]

cloud cloud cloud is useless for those of us with terabytes of data to stream to other rooms and wanted bare metal restore ability. WHS is a great idea and im sad to see it go. Ive been running v1 since its release and its been amazing.

Looks like MS is saying Server 2012 essentials will take on the features of the home version, but its $425 and appears to require using a domain which would really be an unecessary complication for home use.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Just when the possibility of "Storage Spaces" technology in Windows 8 Server was going to make things interesting for WHS. I was looking forward for that.

Guess this will just make FreeNAS and unRAID more popular. Or perhaps they already were.

However, the automated backup features of WHS was really nice. I bought WHS v1, but I never got around to using it fully. I only did a test install.

Edit: I suspect that the issue was not that WHS wasn't popular, but that some small businesses/SOHO were using it instead of buying a real copy of Windows Server.

MS increases their Server ASPs by killing off their low-cost SKU.

After all, the enthusiast market is not dead, and as far as Intel is concerned, their 2500K (overclockable) CPU is their best-selling retail CPU. So there are plenty of enthusiasts out there, and I suspect that there is a large cross-section between overclocking enthusiasts, and storage enthusiasts.

I highly doubt that the market was too small to service with a viable product.

 

[Binky]

Good product, limited market. Despite the poor reception for WHS 2011 due to the lack of drive extender, it is better than the original once you spend a few bucks on drive pool software (if you need it).

 

[ViRGE]

Good product, limited market. Despite the poor reception for WHS 2011 due to the lack of drive extender, it is better than the original once you spend a few bucks on drive pool software (if you need it).

Frankly I'd trust those 3rd party solutions about as well as I could throw them.:|

 

[JimmiG]

cloud cloud cloud is useless for those of us with terabytes of data to stream to other rooms and wanted bare metal restore ability.

Which again is limited market mostly consisting of geeks and "enthusiasts". Most people are perfectly fine with getting movies on little plastic discs or streaming them at sub-DVD quality over the net using their $40 Wireless Router.

 

[notposting]

Yeah, disappointed to see that. Love our home-built WHS v1 here. Around 14 TB here added over a few years (almost full too), but it's awesome even being ancient 2K3 tech.

Drive Extender of course, the nightly backups on 5 pc's, smart enough to only store 1 copy of the identical pc backup system files, VPN service, remote access and streaming, WSUS, etc.

Would have been awesome to see a build utilizing Storage Spaces, integrated Media Center, central storage for system/app/media downloads, etc etc.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yet another reason I'm glad I'm with Linux for my home server. Though, it's kinda surprising they'd discontinue it.

They also discontinued Small Business Server. I'm starting to think they want to go with cloud based stuff so they can milk people monthly, instead of one time.

 

[gmaster456]

Really? They got rid of small business server? Damn. I wonder what alternative there will be.

 

[hoorah]

They also discontinued Small Business Server. I'm starting to think they want to go with cloud based stuff so they can milk people monthly, instead of one time.

I'm thinking the same. They're moving towards the "give us your credit card and cross the 'office computer maintenance' item off of your list" business model. Personally, I think its a smart move for them.

They'll have some sort of paid version of skydrive integrated into their office 365 and you'll be able to buy a whole small office 'package' from microsoft and pay per month.

Not particularly effective for those that have terabytes of data. Hopefully those users don't fall through the cracks between 'just use a laptop small business owner' and 'enterprise 50TB setup'.

 

[rolodomo]

Yet another reason I'm glad I'm with Linux for my home server. Though, it's kinda surprising they'd discontinue it.

I guess I'm one of the few people who might get some use out of Windows 8 professional integrating my HTPC with my file server using WMC, storage spaces, windows networking, a centralized back-up app (hopefully), etc.

Still, it is not cool at all that they discontinued home server software so abruptly.

I'm getting the impression that Microsoft puts you into a reliance situation when you buy into their solution, then they'll arbitrarily pull the rug out from you because they want to focus on tablets, the cloud, or some such hot topic of the day.

Is this a pattern they repeat with their commercial software? It just doesn't seem like a company rely upon these days where any serious investment of money is concerned.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I'm getting the impression that Microsoft puts you into a reliance situation when you buy into their solution, then they'll arbitrarily pull the rug out from you because they want to focus on tablets, the cloud, or some such hot topic of the day.

Yep that's my guess too, and lot of companies will do it. This is one of the reasons I don't like using proprietary/commercial solutions for anything if I can avoid it. Linux may be harder to setup at first than point and click like in Windows, but at least I know Linux will stay around and most things like mdadm raid will continue to exist, and if by chance a system goes away, the open source community always picks up the slack and makes sure a popular system does not just die.

 

[Binky]

Well, Win7 is discontinued in the same way...but both will be supported for many years.

 

[ControlD]

MS should have killed Home Server a couple of years ago (well, I guess you could say they pretty much did kill it with Vail anyhow). Great idea + terrible implementation + non-existent support = POS.

 

[notposting]

MS should have killed Home Server a couple of years ago (well, I guess you could say they pretty much did kill it with Vail anyhow). Great idea + terrible implementation + non-existent support = POS.

Yeah. One of the things companies do sometimes, introduce a product *this close* to being great and then just abandon it immediately.

Even worse seeing some of the tech they are rolling out now (the storage spaces, skydrive etc).

Media Center is another one they just never finished and never fixed.

 

[CSMR]

There just arent that many geeks wanting to run home servers.

There aren't many geeks wanting to install and maintain big home server boxes in their homes.

There are a lot of people installing NASes in their homes; this market is growing fast.

Home servers have many advantages over a NAS. But they will catch on only when they have the same form factors and similar power requirements as NASes.

 

[WT]

Killing it was no surprise to me, as it was clear they wanted to abandon it years ago. I have a v1 MSS that is ideal for what I need it to do an recently picked up the 2011 OS for $30 just in case I need it for another build.

So many guys want to compare WHS to a NAS, but it is so much more than a NAS that its not a comparison. It will be missed, but just like many MS hardware and software solutions, it will be dead simply because they didn't care to make it better.

 

[Red Squirrel]

There aren't many geeks wanting to install and maintain big home server boxes in their homes.

And the ones that do are probably running real raid with mdadm or ZFS.

 

[dagamer34]

Killing it was no surprise to me, as it was clear they wanted to abandon it years ago. I have a v1 MSS that is ideal for what I need it to do an recently picked up the 2011 OS for $30 just in case I need it for another build.

So many guys want to compare WHS to a NAS, but it is so much more than a NAS that its not a comparison. It will be missed, but just like many MS hardware and software solutions, it will be dead simply because they didn't care to make it better.

It was an extremely solid product that no one bought, and because cloud storage fulfills 95% of people's needs, doesn't serve a purpose anymore. The remaining 5% that need terabytes worth of backup space can setup a separate box with a ton of hard drives, install some NAS software, and be on their way.

Besides, the best feature about Windows Home Server, Drive Extender, ended up in quasi-v2
form as Storage Spaces in every version of Windows 8. I think that's far better in the long run.

 

[notposting]

Besides, the best feature about Windows Home Server, Drive Extender, ended up in quasi-v2 form as Storage Spaces in every version of Windows 8. I think that's far better in the long run.

Well I think the best feature is a tie between the DE and nightly backups (that you can recover individual files or do bare metal restores from). Especially using the single instance storage to reduce backup sizes from multiple computers.

I need to start looking into a replacement of my WHS v1 at this point. I may end up just virtualizing it anyway. I think the next setup will be virtual regardless, maybe the new Server 2012 will work for my needs. Hmmm :hmm:

 

[ControlD]

Well I think the best feature is a tie between the DE and nightly backups (that you can recover individual files or do bare metal restores from). Especially using the single instance storage to reduce backup sizes from multiple computers.

That was my biggest reason for buying and sticking with WHS for as long as I did. However, I found that the daily backups were also one of the biggest weaknesses of WHS at the same time. The backup database was quite prone to corruption issues, and once any single backup was corrupted the entire database was rendered useless. I could never understand why an error in a machine A backup would prevent me from restoring files from a machine B backup. To make matters worse, there was no possible way to troubleshoot database errors. The only solution was to run the database repair function which I am pretty sure was simply a shorcut to "del c : \backups\* .*" . MS put almost zero effort into data integrity in regards to the backup database. Over the years I had two hard drives fail. In both cases I was unable to restore a backup because of database errors. It didn't help that WHS by default waits about 30 days before notifying you that there is a problem.

Sorry for the rant, guess WHS and I still have some unresolved issues ...