Windows Home Server OEM pricing

[XMan]

Buy.com Pre-Order

Almost $200?!? Who are they kidding?

 

[Jeff7181]

Actually that sounds reasonable to me. I'll probably wait and see what addons there are available for it before picking it up, but after beta testing it for 5 or 6 months, I like it. If nothing else, for the painless backups.

 

[BD2003]

I like the idea of it, but there were two major problems I had with the beta. First was that there is no 64-bit client for the connector.

Second is absolutely horrendous I/O performance. The file distribution it uses makes it easy to add hard drives and make duplicates. But when its balancing storage or doing its full chkdsk of every drive every 6 hours, throughput and responsiveness drops to ridiculously low levels. It also took a full 5 hours to remove a drive, when there was no more than 20gb of data that needed to be shifted to the other drive. Its all a bit half baked at the moment, to be honest.

At the very least, my suggestion is to not put any data you'd like quick access to on drives that are part of the storage stack. You can just as easily make your own shares on drives that you havent added.

 

[Narse]

Originally posted by: BD2003
First was that there is no 64-bit client for the connector.

I really wish they would release the 64bit client already.

 

[nerp]

Yeah, I'd have thought that they'd get the 64 bit connector out the door with the release of final.

$200 isn't bad a price, if you ask me. Sure, there are some necessary updates and fine tuning, but I'd be willing to pay $200 for an OEM copy. It's a pretty darned useful and cool piece of software that does a lot of complex things effortlessly. You could either do some of same with linux for free (which requires some knowledge) but lacks some of the cool features, or buy a full blown server OS and lose many of the features for much more money. So the price/features seem like a reasonable compromise.

 

[Hurricane Andrew]

That's actually less than I expected. $178 for a light Server OS with 10 client licenses? Heck, 2003 standard with no CAL's is $700---thow in a mere 5 CAL's and you're at $885. Very reasonable considering the market they're going after. Remember, very few other than system builders will be buying this OEM. It's designed to be packaged with an appliance, and originally MSFT wasn't even going to offer this OEM.

Heck, it still comes in cheaper than Vista Ultimate OEM. I'd say pricing is right on the mark.

 

[The Borg]

Hi All,

I have an evaluation copy of Server 2003 running on my little home server. I was wondering if it could be upgraded to Home Server without re-installing the whole OS.

Also, any idea if it can be installed of a CD as opposed to a DVD? I have a funny server that will only boot off it's old SCSI 4 speed CD ROM drive. Installing Linux has been a bit tricky - boot of CD then install off DVD.

Any info will help

 

[spyordie007]

I have an evaluation copy of Server 2003 running on my little home server. I was wondering if it could be upgraded to Home Server without re-installing the whole OS.

I haven't been following the model very closely, but I suspect you will not be able to 'upgrade'; you'll probably need to do a clean install.

 

[Hurricane Andrew]

Originally posted by: The Borg
Hi All,

I have an evaluation copy of Server 2003 running on my little home server. I was wondering if it could be upgraded to Home Server without re-installing the whole OS.

Also, any idea if it can be installed of a CD as opposed to a DVD? I have a funny server that will only boot off it's old SCSI 4 speed CD ROM drive. Installing Linux has been a bit tricky - boot of CD then install off DVD.

Any info will help

You'll need to do a clean install due to the way WHS allocates and handles the storage pool. As for installing from a CD, I'm not sure, but from what I recall from testing, I doubt it.

 

[Homerboy]

Originally posted by: Hurricane Andrew

Originally posted by: The Borg
Hi All,

I have an evaluation copy of Server 2003 running on my little home server. I was wondering if it could be upgraded to Home Server without re-installing the whole OS.

Also, any idea if it can be installed of a CD as opposed to a DVD? I have a funny server that will only boot off it's old SCSI 4 speed CD ROM drive. Installing Linux has been a bit tricky - boot of CD then install off DVD.

Any info will help

You'll need to do a clean install due to the way WHS allocates and handles the storage pool. As for installing from a CD, I'm not sure, but from what I recall from testing, I doubt it.

ACtually if you are running the RTM the upgrade to retail/OEM should be seemless.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...p?item=N82E16832116395
Also up on newegg.com
CAN NOT WAIT

OP if you think $190 is too much for an OS, let alone one of this caliber you're nutso 🙂

 

[Homerboy]

Originally posted by: BD2003
I like the idea of it, but there were two major problems I had with the beta. First was that there is no 64-bit client for the connector.

Second is absolutely horrendous I/O performance. The file distribution it uses makes it easy to add hard drives and make duplicates. But when its balancing storage or doing its full chkdsk of every drive every 6 hours, throughput and responsiveness drops to ridiculously low levels. It also took a full 5 hours to remove a drive, when there was no more than 20gb of data that needed to be shifted to the other drive. Its all a bit half baked at the moment, to be honest.

At the very least, my suggestion is to not put any data you'd like quick access to on drives that are part of the storage stack. You can just as easily make your own shares on drives that you havent added.

Interesting... I've had no issues with accessing any of the info on the network shares at all. (5 HDDs totaling 1.5TB) I've had 2 DVD image streams going to 2 media devices and somebody accessing the shares on 2 PCs at the same time. No slowdown or hesitations at all.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Homerboy

Originally posted by: BD2003
I like the idea of it, but there were two major problems I had with the beta. First was that there is no 64-bit client for the connector.

Second is absolutely horrendous I/O performance. The file distribution it uses makes it easy to add hard drives and make duplicates. But when its balancing storage or doing its full chkdsk of every drive every 6 hours, throughput and responsiveness drops to ridiculously low levels. It also took a full 5 hours to remove a drive, when there was no more than 20gb of data that needed to be shifted to the other drive. Its all a bit half baked at the moment, to be honest.

At the very least, my suggestion is to not put any data you'd like quick access to on drives that are part of the storage stack. You can just as easily make your own shares on drives that you havent added.

Interesting... I've had no issues with accessing any of the info on the network shares at all. (5 HDDs totaling 1.5TB) I've had 2 DVD image streams going to 2 media devices and somebody accessing the shares on 2 PCs at the same time. No slowdown or hesitations at all.

It works wonderfully until you try and access stuff while copying something, leading to the balancing act. Everything is copied to the main drive, it bounces it to other drives, and theres so much I/O going on, and with no I/O prioritization, it can take forever to do certain basic things.

I really dont understand the need for doing a chkdsk on EVERY disc, every 6 hours. Its a home server for crying out loud, and with data duplication, is it really going to be a crisis if theres a small bit of data thats screwed up on one drive? Hell, the crazy disc activity from the constant chkdsk itself is probably going to wear the drives into failure.

When I was finally fed up with it, I had to jump through all these hoops to reorganize the data. I put in another drive, which was big enough so I could fit pretty much everything on it, and I made the mistake of moving rather than copying the data. Moving deleted data as it was copying, which prompted the drive balancer to start shifting around data while I'm still moving, completely clogging the system up. It took 10 hours to shift about 100gb of data on modern SATA hard drives, in the same system...ridiculous. It should have taken no more than an hour, and even thats at a conservative 30mb/sec. Then to "remove" the nearly empty drive, which should only have had about 20gb of data, took 5 hours. Which wasnt abnormal...it told me "this may take several hours." Wtf?

I really dont understand the rationale behind their disk bouncing system. Why it can't just maintain a unified share, and balancing/duplication for several drives without that nonsense is beyond me.

I liked pretty much everything else about it, but I absolutely refuse to use it until they implement I/O priority, or at the very least, pause balancing and chkdsk when no one is accessing data.

 

[JesseKnows]

I had the beta, and dumped it. My system became unusable with less than 5GB free on the D drive but 80GB available elsewhere.