Hello Everyone,
After I heard that WHS “Vail” has been leaked to torrent sites, I couldn’t resist and downloaded the torrent immediately, here, I will explain some of the new things i found so far:
1- Windows Home Server Dashboard: The dashboard is the new windows home server console, from the dashboard you can perform all tasks related to the home server features such as remote access, configuration, backups, Media Streaming and so on, you can notice that the home page includes the getting started actions that some of currently report “Not Implemented Yet”
WHS v2 Dashboard
2- The Add-Ins Management and Online Catalog: The Add-ins Tab provides management functionality to configure WHS Add-Ins and allows you to access the Add-Ins Catalog (Currently doesn’t show any Add-In), I tried to change some settings to enable it but still no add-ins:
WHS v2 Add-Ins Tab
3- The Alerts Page: Alerts has been improved by allowing you to take a quick action to try to repair the current issue, not all alerts have this functionality, however, it seems to me that alerts has been improved a little bit over WHSv1:
WHS v2 Alerts View
4- Domain Providers: When setting up remote access, you can choose to register a new domain name from a list of providers that windows home server retrieves based on your location:
WHS v2 Domain Provider Selection
5- Hard Drive Management: Some options added related to Disk cleanup and Chkdsk
6 – Backups : So far nothing seems to be changed to backups, just as the old one but with a new interface.
7- LaunchPad: The Windows Home Connector software is now LaunchPad, LaunchPad allows you to initiate backups, access the Server’s Dashboard from the client machine, view alerts and access shared folders , it adds a nice icon that is pretty much similar to Forefront Client Security Icon, and uses RDP RemoteApp to connect to the Dashboard Console (seems to be very simple) but full of bugs, (almost all options in it returned errors in my case):
WHS v2 LaunchPad for Client Machines
LaunchPad Tray Icon
8- Remote Access Web Interface: Well, Looks very nice actually, allows online media streaming for videos and music:
WHSv2 Remote Access Web Interface
I also noticed that it runs under Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition:
WHS v2 is not impressing me that much, however, WHSv2 is still in CTP4, I expect that Microsoft will be doing a lot of work in the upcoming period to enhance it and make it better OS.
Additional quick notes :
The Server cannot be promoted to a domain controller
WHSv2 setup automatically installs Active Directory Certificate Services
Tried to activate using Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard Edition Key and it didn’t work, and tried my windows home server v1 product key and it didn’t work.
UPDATE 28/1/2009 3:30 PM: I tested Remote Access Functionality streaming service, it uses Silverlight to stream content for all video, pictures and audio content, and it is Really Really FAST (My connection upload is 256 K) and i streamed a 12 MBytes song with no interruptions.
That’s all for now, I’ll update if I find anything new in this release.