WHS or WS08: Depends on Your Quirks
There's a lot of cool stuff going with Windows Home Server (WHS) lately. Especially now that PP1 has been out for a while and added some fixes and improvements. This short blog post by Paul Thurrott is but one example of the coolness WHS provides. But what caught my attention more than the backup and restore feature, was the comment about it sitting on a shelf. The implication being that you don't need to babysit, or even really tinker with it. It's become what I've always said a home computer needs to become in order to gain mass appeal: an appliance. Yes. Like a thermostat. You occassionally adjust it, but for the most part it does its thing and you don't have to worry about it. WHS is aimed in that direction obviously.
But in some respects so is Windows Server 2008. When the beta program ended, I did the celebratory upgrade to the RTM version and continued on. Happy. Content. Aside from just poking into the inerds to see what they look like, and how they work, I rarely have to tinker with it. It just runs. And to be totally honest here, aside from power outages (storms, etc.) my cheapy little workhorse WS08 server has NEVER had to be forcibly restarted. It has NEVER died. NEVER locked up either. Sure, patches may require a reboot here and there. But I don't have to peak through my fingers covering my eyes to worry about what scarry, obscure error and warning events are lurking in the event logs. I just don't see them very often. I don't have to restart hung or failed services. I don't have to force a restart. In short - It just friggin RUNS.
One test I did was to run a Suse 10 and a Ubuntu 8 server for several weeks without touching them and see whether WS08 required any more restarts. After four weeks, all three servers were prompting me for updates and a restart. But none had restarted for any reason on their own. Is this de facto proof that WS08 is "as reliable" as Ubuntu or Suse? No. But it did prove to me that unlike WS2K and WS03 (which is quite a bit improved over WS2K), WS08 was much more stable and worry-free. And it has remained so for as long as I've been using it. Keep in mind that this "workhorse" server of mine is a rather beat-up Dell OptiPlex GX 260 with 1GB of RAM. It serves up my photo library, music and documents and pretty much everything. God, I love it. Just thinking about it, I drift off into a foggy dream state. Me and my WS08 box running in slow-motion towards each other in a sunny field of tall grass. Someone hand me a tissue please?
Yes, I know, this went totally stupid at the end. Oh well.