14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates unveiled Windows Home Server in early January 2007, presenting a concept that the company envisions at the core of every home network. Delivering storage, back-up, added security and remote access, Windows Home Server is a project which managed to get past the media in its early stages. Scheduled for availability in the second half of 2007, Windows Home Server will be bundled with server products from top manufactures. In this regard, WHS will be launched bundled with MediaSmart Server from HP.
Windows Home Server Beta 2 was debuted at the beginning of February 2007. Since then, the server product has come a long way and gathered a consistent amount of support. Now Microsoft is making the necessary preparations to release the Windows Home Server Candidate (RC). With the beta program out of the way and the transition to the RC stage, Microsoft is sending out the signal that Windows Home Server is close to be released to manufacturing.
Consequently, the Redmond Company has shut down feedback submission via Connect as of May 23, and will only take features request and problem reports on the Windows Home Server Forums. "This is a natural evolution of our product development cycle. In the RC the default option for Server Setup is going to be "New Installation." The effect of this is you will not be able to easily upgrade from Beta 2/CTP to RC or RTM. This is going to be painful for some of you who have large data sets and we apologize up front for that. However, the changes we made were essential to ensuring a great user experience for the product moving forward and as beta testers we are sure you can understand," revealed Kevin Beares, Windows Home Server Community Lead via an email published by ActiveWin.
Beares did inform that the Server Recovery mechanism is an alternative way to move to the RC and RTM builds, but this does not represent an upgrade. Instead, Microsoft has put forward the strong recommendation that users perform a clean install of the release candidate build.
"We know that some of you have very large data sets where having another backup is practically impossible and/or the act of copying such a data set is extremely time consuming (our instrumentation tells us that one of you has over 6.5TB of data!). However, based on beta testing feedback we determined that we had no choice but to make some changes to the system that broke the easy upgrade path," Beares added.