Computers have become a mandatory tool when it comes to running a business. The small business office can vary from a single PC used just for basic record keeping all the way up to several networked computers performing many different aspects of the business such as taking orders, providing customer support, software development, maintaining client lists, and more. The failure or loss of even one of these critical components can result in delayed or missed commitments, upset customers, and financial loss.
Managing these technology resources can be one of the more complicated aspects of running a small business, and many companies turn to IT Consulting providers such as Kevin Royalty of Total Care Computer Consulting. I assisted Kevin in a recent webcast titled “Business Opportunities with Windows Home Server”, where he advocates that Windows Home Server can be an excellent solution in small businesses that may not be a good fit for Small Business Server, as well as businesses that may need to use Windows Home Server as a complement to Small Business Server. The Windows Home Server Backup Software in particular provides what is arguably one of the most important IT tasks for the small business.
The company where I work, RealGo Inc., has 9 employees comprised mostly of software development engineers, with a SysAdmin to manage IT tasks, a graphic designer, and myself for testing and release management. All of our daily work is safely managed by Subversion for revision control, and our network shares are all on large RAID systems. However our daily workstations were not being backed up, so a corrupt OS or lost system disk would cost a developer at a minimum several hours to rebuild and more likely a day or more of lost productivity. I’d been advocating that we implement Windows Home Server in the office to back up all of our workstations, so when some time opened up in my schedule the boss gave me the go-ahead and I spent an afternoon getting Windows Home Server installed and configured.
The first step was to get the Windows Home Server installation software. This is easily acquired for a very reasonable cost (currently $95.00) from sites such as Newegg.com, but since we are Microsoft Action Pack subscribers, I used the media and license included in that package. Next I had to get the hardware lined up, and so our SysAdmin gave me a Virtual Machine running in VMware ESXi. The VM has a single processor, 1GB of RAM, and 1TB of disk space from the 4×1TB drive RAID5 array. The installation is straight forward, with the only trick being that in order to avoid a Blue Screen (BSOD) during the install I had to change the SCSI Controller Type to “BusLogicParallel” and load the storage driver from the vmscsi-1.2.0.4.flp image.
After installing Windows Home Server and all the subsequent updates, it was a simple matter of installing the Client Connector Software on all of my coworkers workstations and get them backed up. I was very interested to see how much storage space would be used, since we all have modern PCs with at least a 160GB hard drives. Fortunately due to the excellent single instance storage feature of the Windows Home Server backup software that only stores a single copy of duplicate files across all the backups, this resulted in a very small amount of consumed space due to the high amount of common files. Since all the developers use the same tools and source files, the majority of files are the same across all systems. The end result is about 200GB consumed for our client backups, consisting of 9 workstations.
Only the SysAdmin, myself, and our boss have access to the Server Console for management purposes, and so I’ve disabled the health notifications on all the other employees workstations. This results in near-silent operation for all the users and the administrators get notified in the event the Home Server needs our attention.
One annoyance is that since we aren’t using the network shares on Windows Home Server for storage, we don’t have any user accounts created and so every time a workstation is rebooted the user gets the following message after logging on. One workaround for this is to remove the shortcut from your Startup folder that launches WHSTrayApp.exe, which will prevent the Tray Application from loading.
So far we’ve not had the need to call on our Home Server Backups, as we’ve had no hard drive failures and most important files that might be deleted are also checked into Subversion. However we now are all more confident knowing that our systems are backed up and can easily be restored in a very short period of time, should the need arise.
Windows Home Server is obviously not a single-tool solution for all our needs, but the case is quite strong for it as an excellent backup solution that integrates very well into many small business environments. Are you using Windows Home Server in your small business, have you installed this for any of your clients or customers, or does this give you an idea on how to help a future customer?
Additional Resources
- Kevin Royalty’s Business Opportunities with Windows Home Server (recorded)
- Kevin Royalty is speaking at SMBNation Fall 2009 about “Taking Windows Home Server Deep Into Small Business!”
- Using Windows Home Server to Back Up Windows Small Business Client Computers
- Windows Home Server – Can It Be a SOHO Solution?
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Article by Alex Kuretz
I'm Alex Kuretz, and I'm the founder of MediaSmartServer.net. I was the Lead Test and Integration Engineer at HP for the MediaSmart Server until April 2008 when I moved on to other opportunites outside HP. I've kept active in the WHS community, creating several add-ins and helping users make the most of their Home Servers.
{ 33 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey Alex,
Great article (I know, took me a while to read!). Funny that I hadn’t thought of running WHS in a vm before, but it sounds like a great way to set it up with the infrastructure you already have in place.
Obviously, i am a great fan of the WHS (HP MSS, in particular) and have been considering its applications in the SOHO market for a while. Thanks for the real-lofe example – and good job selling the idea to your own workplace.
Any recoveries done so far? I am curious to know if the recoveries (if any) have run smoothly?
Hi Phil,
Thanks for reading, and I’m glad you enjoyed the article.
We’ve not had the need to restore a PC yet, but I’ve restored many PCs on other home servers during my time testing at HP, and have continued to occasionally restore for various testing activities for myself and Microsoft. I have tried the single file restore feature and it’s worked fine.
Let me know if you have any more questions!
Thanks,
Alex
I love WHS.
My family has a small business selling musical instruments and accessories. Our program used for our POS, Inventory, Rentals, etc… is a very simple VisualFoxPro system.
I use HP MSS for our main “File Server” as well as for the obvious image backups of our individual machines in the store. This has actually saved me a whole day as on my day off, our shipping workstation went out on us. I was able to walk an employee (with no computer knowledge) over the phone on how to use the client restore CD and restore the computer to a previous night’s backup. 20 minutes later, the system was back up and running without a problem.
For a small business environment, the WHS is a great, robust tool!
Dave, this is a great story, thanks for sharing!
Quick question.. does SBS 2008 have the same Image Based Backup as Home Server? As in, can I use a Quick Restore CD to restore the complete OS image?? Like Dave did:
“I was able to walk an employee (with no computer knowledge) over the phone on how to use the client restore CD and restore the computer to a previous night’s backup. 20 minutes later, the system was back up and running without a problem.”
Does Small Business Server 2008 have similar functionality?
No, the backup solution exists only in Windows Home Server, which is why many people recommend a WHS solution alongside the SBS solution.
Thanks so much for your quick reply.. I’ve been trying to find these out all over the net, and it really wasn’t easy! I’ve been wondering whether to go with SBS 08 or WHS for my uncle’s small business network (6 computers), and based on this, WHS it is.. since he needs to be able to quickly restore machines with no professional IT help.
And good article.
I really wish they would combine more aspects of WHS and SBS. There are certain features SBS can use that WHS has and reverse. I would love to see WHS with an Exchange (lite?) support and would love it if SBS had the hard drive and backup features of WHS. Would be great to just have ONE server OS for home, SOHO and small biz that would allow you to select / pay for the features you need then at install.
Dave, if you did a restore of a client PC in 20 minutes then your client PC must contain small amounts of data.
It took my ex495 well over a day (at gigabit speed) to backup a hard drive with approximately 750GB of data. I presume it would take at least that much time to reverse the process in the event the hard drive failed.
I think many small businesses would find the amount of downtime required to restore a crashed hard drive on the client PC unacceptable.
It’s a very nice product but I think the HOME in WHS is well taken.
In my office we restored a ~160GB PC in about an hour and a half just last week. Well over a day sounds very long, was the server doing a lot of other work such as migrating data moved to it, converting videos, or indexing media?
I’ll argue that many business PCs won’t be containing 750GB of data. I’ll also advocate that there’s probably a good reason to have stored much of that on the Server to minimize your backup size and time.
Mike,
I have actually had to do the network restore 2 times. One on the shipping work computer described above and another on my wife’s laptop at home.
I dont know the full technical process behind the restore, but while yes, the initial backup process is time consuming, the restore is no where near as long.
The work computer described above was a Win XP Pro install that has only a few programs installed on it (our POS software, a credit check program, anti virus, UPS software & MS Office). So it’s image file would obviously not be 750Gb. However, the restore took about 20 minutes over a wired 100mb ethernet, not gigabit.
My wife’s computer was a Win Vista and had a LOT more data on it’s hard drive (many more programs, VISTA, office, pictures, music, etc…). The initial time to back it up was obviously much longer (but the subsequent backups are only a few minutes after that since it is done nightly). When I had to restore her computer, it was done over a my home 100mb ethernet. Took about 35 minutes.
So my ASSUMPTION is that the software compares the image of the hard drive in it’s broken state and only changes what it NEEDS to change in order to get back to the backup image state.
Maybe a WHS tech guru can explain it with the actual facts. In either case, I cannot begin to say how much I love WHS.
Alex,
Great article. I had not actually heard of WHS until yesterday. I work for a small company. We have about 20 employees. We are looking for a simple backup tool, and WHS sounds just like what we need. Only problem is that 10 user account limit. I looked at SBS as an option, but it’s much more than we need. Is there anyway to work around the 10 user account limit, or am I just going to have to look at some other software options? Thanks.
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your comments, unfortunately there is no workaround for the 10 client limit. Do you have 20 users, or 20 client computers that you’d want to back up? If you’ve got 20 PCs to back up, you can consider implementing two Home Servers, each backing up 10 clients. This would be especially easy if you’re using WHS in a virtual machine as I do at my job, simply create another VM for the second Home Server. The OEM software is only $99 at Newegg. Would that be feasible for you?
Alex,
I’m not very familiar with virtual machine. My only experience was setting up VMWare on a MAC so it could run Windows 7. Are you saying I could do the same sort of thing on a PC with WHS? I can install two VM instances of it on one PC? If so, what specs would you suggest on that PC? Thanks.
Hi Dan,
Yes, you can run multiple VMs at the same time on a given hardware, you’ll want to be able to dedicate a CPU core plus 1GB of RAM to each instance. I’m hesitant to go about recommending hardware as I just don’t have perspective into your needs, budget, etc. If you’re not comfortable or familiar with setting up the system you may want to chat with a small business technology consultant, there are several I know that are WHS enthusiasts and Microsoft MVPs that I can put you in touch with if interested, just send me a mail through the “Contact” page with your info and location.
This is a great article, I have a Small Accounting firm I do work for and they were using old computers, and had no implementation for backups. So I suggested to them WHS, the owner was curious, so I set it up to their needs. The only problem I had was Qucikbooks and the securities of the qbw, so I dedicated a extra drive just for Quickbooks. Problem solved! Quickbooks backs up to the extra drive and all 6 of there computers get backedup nightly, as well as a Antivirus scan by Avast having a WHS edition that works great with Avast Pro!
Thanks for sharing your story, David. I agree that WHS can be a great benefit to small businesses, and it’s nice to hear your workaround for the Quickbooks.
Ok… would it be feasible then to run let’s say 4 Virtual Machines of Windows Home Server so I could backup 40 Client Workstations?
Or is this a bad idea… I should look into Trueimage or some other network backup application for a larger network like this?
Just wondering.
It’s certainly feasible, though I’m not sure if it’s the best solution. You’d need to weigh the cost of maintenance, etc versus another solution to see which would best meet your needs. There are no issues with running multiple WHS servers in the same network, however.
Great article. I completely agree that it is perfect for small businesses. As head of IT where I work, I manage 18 computers plus WHS. I’ve already used the restore feature five times and my boss loves it. I was looking into getting a second server up so I can backup the rest of the computers and had a questions about using virtual machines. So I would install VM server onto WHS and then run the vm inside of that. Or should install lunix or XP or something and run two vms of WHS inside? Also, if you could send me the contact info of a couple of your WHS enthusiasts I would really appreciate it.
Hi Adam, good to hear how WHS is working out for you! I suggest running VMWare or similar (we use ESXi at work) on dedicated hardware and then run your WHS VM’s inside that.
I’m not sure what contact info you’re asking for, feel free to contact me if you’ve got specific questions.
I think I’ve pretty much got it figured out. I think I’m going to install win7 or XP, install VMware Server on that, and then run my WHS virtual machines. That way XP or 7 will act as my host. This is important because I might want to add more WHS virtual machines later, and WHS is only in 32bit, and I may need to use more the 3.5gigs or RAM. Does VMware Server do a good job of allocating memory?
Also, just thought of this, what will client computers see on the network? By that I mean, will they see the XP system, or will both servers appear. This is important since the server will have files that need to be accessed by everyone. Thanks.
I would instead recommend running the WHS VM’s inside of ESXi rather than installing VMWare inside of Windows, the performance will be better and that will be a more robust implementation, IMHO.
I wasn’t aware that ESXi was free, or I would’ve looked into that from the beginning. My question still stands about what client computers will see on the network. Will it show up as two separate computers? Like, for accessing the public folders, are there any issues. Thanks for all your help!
A client can be joined with a single server at a time, which means it can only back up to a single server, run the console for one server, etc. You can map drives to both, and both servers will appear in Network Neighborhood.
I am sorry to post this question here, but I cannot seem to get an answer on how to set up a second MSS, despite Google searches of the internet or forums. I bought two EX475s in 6/08, one of which I had used for two years and is currently on WHS PP3, named HTFMserver. The other one is presumably as it was when bought. I want to add the second server to my network. I plugged it in and turned it on, and it appears on the network as HPserver. However, since I cannot just plug in the original connector installation CD to configure it, how do I get the existing WHS Console (Windows Home Server Console: 6.0.2423.0) to recognize it? I know the console can only connect to one MSS at one time, but how to switch?
Sorry that I must be missing the obvious.
Hi Jack,
You can try running c:\program files\windows home server\discovery.exe on the client as that is what “joins” the PC to the server, but I’m not positive how it will handle the old version and if it will work correctly for the initial setup. You’re probably best off uninstalling the Windows Home Server Connector and HP MediaSmart Server software from the PC and re-installing from the CD.
After the new server is set up and fully updated you can switch back and forth by running Discovery.exe.
Thank you. Indeed tryign to connect using the newer connector to the older WHS did crash the connecting PC. I guess I can install the older connector software to another PC that has no connector software, and admisnister the second MSS from that machine? That way the versions are correct when we start, and I don’t have to switch on the current PC.
Thanks for your help.
Just an update for anyone reading.
I decided to set up the ‘new’ MSS using a computer on the network that was previously did not have connector. It was not easy setting up an old MSS using original disks. It crashed a couple of times, and required a reinstall from factory state. It gets finished with all installs, then hangs on updating, and then the MSS is not accessable anymore unless reinstalled.
Now I have two MSSs running on the network, each controlled by a different computer. Next: try to install Sync Toy so the second server can be a backup for the first, which is all I wanted in the first place.
It can take a very long time to get all the updates downloaded for the EX47x servers, usually leaving it for a few hours will allow things to finish on their own. I’m glad to hear you got it working!
Hello again, my boss recently had his hd on his home computer crash with some business documents on it. So that got me thinking, is there a way that WHS can do backups outside the LAN. I did a little research and it seems this is possible. There are two methods, one by using OpenVPN and the other creating a VPN on the server. Creating the VPN on the server, using the built in MS software, seems like the easiest, but I have no experience with VPNs. Will the VPN connection stay open on the client computer when it restarts or loses and gets the connections back? I know with OpenVPN this is possible but apparently there is some scripting that would need to be done. The two methods I’m referring to can be found here.
http://wiki.wegotserved.com/index.php?title=Create_a_VPN_Using_Your_Windows_Home_Server
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/whssoftware/thread/1408be22-2e1b-4230-90d4-84f0b86b22b8/
It’s definitely possible, however I’ve not done it myself. I believe some forum members have done this with the Hamachi VPN software, I’ll suggest you do a search in the forums and then post there if you have further questions.