After a long and somewhat traumatic development phase Windows Home Server 2011 has been signed off. It’s been a couple of months since the release candidate was made available and this is final stage in a difficult birth. There was a considerable outcry from the Windows Home Server community when Microsoft announced they were removing the drive extender technology from WHS having failed to get it working reliably and then HP announced they were pulling out of the WHS market.

When Vail (WHS 2011’s code name) was announced I had high hopes for this being the centre of my home network acting not only as a backup and storage server  but also a Media Center server pushing content to extenders with pooled tuners and shared guide data. But since then we have seen extenders fail (expect for the Xbox 360) and WHS’s features scaled back so I don’t see Windows Home Server 2011 as important as it once and find it hard to get enthusiastic about it but still the remote access, backup services and file shares are worth having.

I am sure Andrew will be talking about it on the podcast this week.

More details from the Windows Home Server Blog

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.

 

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