I have been using Microsoft
Direct Access (DA) for the past 3 weeks.
I can unequivocally say I love it.
So far my only issues has been Monday mornings waking up the laptop from
hibernate and finding no DA connection.
Cause: Turns out
this is being caused by the VMWare Virtual network adapters.
Why: I haven’t a clue. Well then how do you know they are the
cause?
Solution: if I
disable the VMWare Virtual network adapters suddenly Direct Access works
again. Once I am back online with DA
then I can enable the VMWare Virtual Adapters.
This seems to only happen when the laptop has been in
hibernate for >24 hours.
In summary, if you have DA working one day… and find it does
not another. Try disabling virtual
network adapters.
Looks like I will need to rebuild my Intel SS4200-ehw again. It has been an interesting experience going from WHS 2003 through each of the builds of WHS 2011. Lets say this was one of the more challenging betas I have done in a while.
Will I upgrade? Yes.
Notes:
- If you have WHS 2003, you will need to export ALL of your files. You cannot do an upgrade. And if you do not move off all of your files you can NOT easily access the files on the previous hard drives
- Drive extender no longer exists. 3rd party products exist to replace the functionality. However, would you trust some 3rd party app that was written in the last three months? Time to setup RAID!
- x64 only. YEAA!
- Server 2008 R2 SP1 is the base platform
- Online support is much better
How to build a WHS without a video card (headless)?
- Get the bits - it will be on technet mid April
- Grab a different computer with a video card
- Hookup the hard drive to the machine with a video card. I use a thermaltake SATA docking station.
- burn the bits to dvd or boot from usb
- Run the install
- At the first restart, turn off the other computer, pull the drive and place it in your whs box (the one without a video card)
- Let the sucker run (it will reboot serveral times)
- Eventually (about 15 minutes) a new Network comptuer called Server will show up (check your router for the IP)
- Open up http://server or http://IP of the server
- a website will walk you through the rest of the setup
Congrats you just built WHS 2011 in a headless server.
Today, the Home Server engineering team signed off the release version of WHS 2011. An exciting milestone which now starts the process to make it available for purchase.
Affordable and easy-to-use, Windows Home Server 2011 is the ideal solution to help families keep their important digital files and data automatically backed up, organized, and accessible from virtually anywhere.
To help with questions we hear during this time of the product release cycle, I have provided further guidance below. If you have a specific question, please feel free to post in comments, on our WHS forum.
- When will OEM’s offer WHS 2011? Many OEM’s and System Builders have already started building specific form factors and solutions based on WHS 2011. We expect to start seeing them in the market starting May.
- What languages is WHS 2011 available in? WHS 2011 will be released in 19 languages including Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan), Chinese (Hong Kong), Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.
- When will the Evaluation for WHS 2011 be made available? The evaluation experience for WHS 2011 will be released in early April.
- When will I be able to download WHS 2011 via my TechNet or MSDN subscription? WHS 2011 will be made available on MSDN and TechNet also in early April.
- What is the difference between V1 of WHS and WHS 2011? You can learn more about differences in our comparison datasheet.