So I'm trying to build a home server/media server...

After lots of fits and starts, I've finally pulled the trigger on some home server hardware and am looking for ideas on how to set it up.

Ideally, the server would be used to store and serve up the following:
-Photos (tens of thousands and growing)
-Home movies
-MP3s
-Soon to be created DVD library
-Important home related documents

My home network is both wired and wireless and supports gigbit ethernet. We have multiple Xbox 360's that are used for games and netflix, would like to use them to watch the DVD's, stream music, etc. We also have a MyBook Live 2TB NAS that we currently store all of our pictures and mp3s on. We have 2 HP laptops running Windows 7, a few Nooks, and in January we'll be getting a Surface Pro.

I've ordered the following (should be delivered today):
HP ProLiant N40L Ultra Micro Tower Server System AMD Turion II Neo N40L 1.5GHz 2-Core 2GB (1 x 2GB) 1 x 250GB LFF SATA 658553-001
Two Western Digital WD Green WD20EARX 2TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive - OEM
Kingston 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Server Memory Model KVR1333D3E9SK2/8G

I have access to Microsoft employee discounts on software, and I'm very familiar with most of their products (I'm a .Net Architect/Developer by trade) so I'd like to stick with stuff I know (and could customize or build add-ins for).

My software options appear to be:
WHS2011 (seems to be pretty solid, but no longer supported)
2012 Server Essentials (very new and unknown)
Windows 8 + Media Center (seems to have issues with various audio codecs when streaming to 360s - no word on a fix yet)
Windows 7 Professional (seems to be very solid as a media center)

I'd like to not have to have 2 PC's - one as a home server and one running WMC, but I'd like to get as much functionality in one box as possible.

Something that I thought might be possible, but I have NO experience with (and am unsure that my hardware would be very good for it) would be putting something like Hyper V on it and virtualizing a Windows 7 MC and either WHS2011 or Server 2012 Essentials. Is that worth even trying?

I'd love to hear others suggestions/experiences/recommendations.

You could always upgrade to 16GB of RAM and make it a Hyper-V machine as you state above. I'm not super familiar with AMD offerings these days, though, so that processor might be underpowered. Win 7 MC is very solid. I have it set up at home and have only had a couple glitches with the 360 and PC not seeing each other after a long period of disuse. I've never touched WHS or Server Essentials, since I get licenses for Standard versions of Server through work.

Every solution is pretty much a custom one.
I went with Server 2012 (STD) to replace my WHS2003 box for the actual storage BUT I still have my WHS2003 box because of the nightly client backups. If this is something you want, I say WHS though the 2011 version doesn't have Disk Extender you can find third party tools to add it back.

Since you're not using MC as a DVR I am wondering why you would use MC on the server as any WinVista box or higher can host it. Windows 8 has Drive Pooling (Microsoft's official replacement for Drive Extender) essentially, use the server as the file repository and only the MC if you need to. Using extenders will not give you the same 'Movies' functionality you get on a full Windows box running MCE, you will have to configure the share drive as part of the library under videos.

As for playing my raw dvd rips (vob), mp3's, avi's and mp4's I've never had an issue on my extenders (linksys dma2100) but again, these are all done on the machine hosting media center.

For my first go, I started with Server 2102 Essentials, as I had read quite a bit about it being a solid replacement for WHS and had the StorageSpaces and media sharing bits that made most folks fans of WHS. The main concern for most people seemed to be price and with my MS connections, that really isn't an issue.

For now, I'm just in experimenting mode and may scrap everything and move to a different set up. My intial thoughts where that I wanted to have the media sharing and backup operations that WSE provided, but I'm not clear on what the media sharing/serving experience is and that is why I was thinking I might want to do the server/MC combo. I need to have something that is a solid, easy to use experience for the wife and kiddo (from a laptop and the TV/Xboxes) - if it isn't easy for them to use, then I'm fighting a losing battle on the media front. They don't really grasp the need of nightly backups and drive mirroring and such, but I will feel much better having some redundancy and maybe even offsite backups (WSE supports cloud backups - not sure on cost yet) for our family's media.

So, my initial thought was to do WSE by itself and then see if I needed to add anything - I had read that you can add the Hyper V role to WSE and figured that if I needed to do a MC box that I could try the Hyper V route and then if the server couldn't handle it, I could get a seperate box and move the MC image to it.

Anyway, yesterday the server was delivered and I started tinkering...Adding the extra RAM and a BluRay reader/dvd burner was fairly painless. I went ahead and set up WSE at my office. I found a WSE build of My Movies and installed that along with some other stuff to help with its functionality. The My Movies integration with the dashboard is pretty cool and makes using it very simple.

I took the server home and plugged it into our home network and started really digging into things. From my wife's Win 7 Home laptop, I installed the connector software and that is where things swerved off the rails a bit. The connector software installed without issue, but once it was on there the laptop had a hard time browsing the internet and while it could run the launchpad app, it could not see the shares or connect directly to the server. The server could see the machine was on the network and I could pick which parts of the the laptop I wanted to back up, but going the other way wouldn't work.

About an hour or so later, I discovered that by installing the connector software, it makes all kinds of changes to the laptop including setting the machine's DNS server to the WSE server's IP. I have two different routers at home and use one for my DNS, so on the laptop I set the primary DNS to be my router and the secondary to be the WSE server. This fixed the laptop's web browsing issues and also made it where it could connect to the server and see the media shares. I'm sure there's a better way to have it configured, but for now it seems to work.

After getting that straightened out, I started experimenting with the My Movies and trying to get that to work on the laptops and 360's. Using My Movies, I created rips of the movies and then used the conversion process to convert them to MP4. The rips didn't take very long - prob 20 mins or so per disk, but the conversion took hours. I tried playing movies from rips on the XBox video player and it didn't work. It could see the server and media shares w/out issue, but that was it. (It could see my MP3 library with all the info, so that was nice.) This morning, I tried getting the XBox to see and play the MP4 but it couldn't find it. I also tried playing the MP4 over the network on the wife's laptop's media player and that didn't seem to work either.

I think I need some guidance on how to configure the ripping and conversions in My Movies - I plan on digging thru their forums today, and will look into ripping to VOB as eezy mentioned.

I don't know if you've already looked into this but XBMC is a very good media centre software solution. It's free, it works on Windows and most distributions of Linux (and maybe Mac - not sure). It also has its own distribution for linux so basically it's own OS. There's lots of network features that far outstrip Microsoft's MC in every way.

I've been using it on a fairly old laptop plugged into my HDTV with WinXP ruining the very first Intel dual core cpu, 2GB of ram and a integrated Intel GPU that is a waste of space for games, and it runs flawlessly - it actually says 59-60fps on the system info - even when playing a HD movie.

The customisation is very good and it looks like a professional media centre. The thing I like most about it is, when you add media to the library it downloads fan/official artwork for the Film/TV Show and also plot synopsis. It's also got plugins like YouTube so you can watch a YouTube clip straight from it without going to your browser and also I've got an IGN plugin on there too. Also I've never had a problem playing any type of file. It seems to have all the codecs you'll ever need built right in - a bit like VLC.

Take a look at it before your set on the software http://xbmc.org/ it may save you time in the end. I really can't recommend this software enough!!

As for the server itself, surely all you need is a network HDD and access it directly through your router? That's what I was planning to do as all I have at the moment is a 2TB external HDD. It sounds very time consuming and frustrating setting up a server just to backup and access your media.

Also, I've been using one of these http://riitouch.com/entertainment.html. It's handy if you wanna lay on the couch and control the media centre, good for browsing the web and not too bad for knocking out a quick paragraph on a forum too.

Sharing so you can see how many ways there are to skin this cat.

Just ditched my living room HTPC after yet another hardware failure. It was running Windows 7 with XBMC, and I ran Netflix in a browser. For a remote we used a Logitech K400. I saw no need to run a dedicated server OS, as at home I wasn't going to run into any limitations with plain old reliable Win7.

As a replacement, I bought a Roku and run Plex Media Server on my gaming PC. The Roku might have a dumbed down interface compared to XBMC, but its Plex channel does a great job with media and its Netflix channel is more than adequate. As a bonus, I can now stream media to phones, tablets, and PCs both at home and over the internet via Plex. I've had my gaming rig playing games and streaming different stuff to 3 devices simultaneously without breaking a sweat.

Contrasting the new setup with the old:

+ No extra PC to maintain. Between work and home we have enough anyway. Consolidated the drives from the old one into my gaming rig. They're dedicated to media now with no OS overhead on them.
+ Can stream our media to nearly anything, anywhere. Plex streams to damn near everything (Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, plus many new TVs and appliances) and can change bit rate/quality on the fly for smooth streaming over the internet. The server even has a web portal built in so you don't need a dedicated client on PCs.
+ Roku gives us easy access to Netflix. XBMC's Netflix integration was bad - when it worked. We ran it in a browser.
+ The Roku Android/iOS remote app allows us to stream media from our devices to the Roku, and has an on-screen keyboard as well. Any Android or iOS tablet/smartphone can be a remote, and can stream to the Roku.
- I liked XBMC's interface better than the Roku, and it was snappier.
- The PC was more flexible, and could do PC stuff like browsing the web better. I can't think of anything off-hand that I miss, though.

I've never even heard of Plex till now, I'll definitely be looking into it. I'm buying a house soon so ill be researching the best way's to stream/access my media, especially since the misses has a tablet and I have 2 laptops, a PC for gaming, a 360 and a Vita, so there loads of gadgets to stream stuff too - I just wish my Ipod had WIFI like my old Zune did....

I was looking at getting a oldish Dell Optiplex with the Core2Duo or Quad, they're cheap enough now and, like you've put there, PC's are more flexible. And It'll fit nicely under the telly like a DVD player would.

I have My Movies but don't use it yet in production yet, I still stick to the default version of the Movie browser in MCE. It's essentially a different version of DVDProfiler and it messed up all my JPG covers of my movies. So I'm still waiting for time to be able to devote to tuning it right for my setup.
My Movies doesn't have a built-in ripper (at least mine doesn't) it still requires AnyDVD and I'd rather use CloneDVD (another slysoft product) than My Movies. If you're going to transcode from raw DVD to another format (Mp4 or MKV) there is only one answer, Handbrake. Try it on different machines to find the fastest, here's a guide. My older 3-core AMD surprisingly is the fastest doing 2 hour movies in about 45 minutes.

Here's a general pic of my setup:
IMAGE(https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-_EIlk24EKZA/UO8DPdCEU3I/AAAAAAAAAsw/9D-hE1FltSU/s800/BordoneCloud.jpg?gl=US)

Up until the middle of last year everything on the 2012 box was on the WHS. Itunes is on my wife's PC in the dining room and attaches to the music share in the MC library. I have a separate copy of the music folder on the family share (dupe data I know) that music managers do not touch. I clean up tags on Amazon purchases, put them on the family share and then have a script that copies the famshare\music to the music library. It's the only way to keep my OCD on tagging happy.
Similar with DVD's and BluRays I rip them on my wifes machine in the dining room (the only full fledged desktop in the house mine is now in the garage damn kids). Blurays get ripped on my wifes machine but I transcode on my backup MCE box in the garage (this is the one that has My Movies installed and running, I do any new addons changes here before bringing them to 'Production' in the living room.) I run a script from the wife's machine to copy them to the server after quality control (did I pick the right audio?).
Pictures get dumped out to a folder on the famdrive then again, a script is run to copy them to the library drive for MC use (the MC screensaver is F'ing awesome).
Of course everything wired except the laptops though I do have drops for when I need to do some work that requires real throughput (re-image from WHS backup).

I didn't draw a box but the inspiron site beneath the TV you can't even tell a PC is in there. The machine is pretty quiet and I put in a fanless video card with HDMI since it didn't have HDMI when I got it (it started out as a Vista box).
IMAGE(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-hh_F5O41cFQ/UO8HsaqiHFI/AAAAAAAAAtA/JnbarwAgEIk/s800/IMG_2803.JPG)

The living room box logs in automatically (this and the kids laptop are the only thing that do this) with specific credentials that limit it read-only access except for one folder on the server in case I ever do any work and I'm too lazy to connect to its admin share from my wife's machine. MC loads automatically upon boot and my son has been using this since he was three and can pull up any show or movie he wants.

Parental controls so far is the weakest link, I'll have to devise some sort of tiered shares at some point because all the movies sit on one share (no pr0n but still they don't need to watch boogie nights either). Since MC is no longer being developed I'll most likely move to XBMC or something but my project this year will be to get 3 more 3TB drives (I have 4.5TB left on the 2012 box) and a wireless media center in my wifes car running RaspPi or something else where the kids can use old android devices to replace the two-screen DVD setup we have now. The DVD player doesn't work so great in the winter and I can't be bothered to talk to my children, I just turn the music up.

That's a nice setup - and by the looks of it very expensive! How have you nearly filled FIVE 3TB drives? That's crazy, i thought i was doing well nearly filling one 2TB drive haha

On WHS all the drives go into one big pool for the 14.6TB, then as you create folders you can click a button to 'mirror' that folders contents. All that does is make sure that that folder's contents get written to two of the drives in the box. In other words, it takes 2x the size of the folder out of the pool. My 2TB of DVDs was eating 4TB in that setup. In fact WHS 2003 broke out this duplication on the storage page.
IMAGE(https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-PyzgUFhs0G4/UO80AZacDJI/AAAAAAAAAtw/Dq567anhXko/s800/WHS-DE.jpg)

With SVR2012, Disk Extender as the tech was called in WHS has been updated to Storage Spaces. There are a number of behind the scenes changes but it's mostly the same (configuration is more complex but in practice it works very similar except in some key areas). With Storage Spaces, I can create my pool like in WHS but then I can assign virtual storage from this pool. So my 13.6TB pool shows up as 1 15TB Mirrored share and 1 50TB Parity share (similar to the example in the Win8 Blog Post). The system sees the 15TB and 50TB the only place I see the drives behind it is when I go into the storage pool admin tool on the server. This is also where I manage this from and can add/remove drives and all that fun stuff. For the foreseeable future I don't plan on ever hitting those sizes and really chose those numbers in hopes I never have to change them.

IMAGE(https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-g6eMB2zrtgk/UO8z_1pvWcI/AAAAAAAAAto/YogXofhaECY/s660/StorPool.jpg)

IMAGE(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-p4CcKodZvYI/UO8w_zxgfHI/AAAAAAAAAtQ/xOfai9GMs9w/s760/Mirror%2520Share.jpg)
The parity drive (which remember is all of my copy and forget files: DVDs, 12 years of digital photos, 23 years of CD purchases and backups of my RecordedTV) allows for more RAID 5 type numbers in regards to storage usage but still the redundancy eats some space.
IMAGE(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-qH4O1oYD6Ds/UO8xAhVVK-I/AAAAAAAAAtY/zUgghNLv-Go/s760/Parity%2520Share.jpg)

There are some caveats to running this feature, I have de-dupe installed and it does me no good since de-dupe doesn't work with ReFS.
The cases for my WHS and 2012 server are the same so I can go to 8 drives easily and add three more drives with a drive bay that will fit.

I've had friends want to do what I've done and I warn them, it's not a cheap dump of cable. There are ways to do that but that's not what I've done. I have cable, dvds, music, pictures and my DVR all in one box that can stream to any other TV in the house with an extender in a system so easy to use my 6 year old started using it at 2. Also with the awesome screensaver in MC my kids have actually seen most of the photos that my wife and I have taken since we met each other.

I don't really know how to end this other than to say, most likely that TexasRay can get by with Win7/8 running a shared drive for most of what he says he wants to do. It's when you get into the 'other stuff' that things get fuzzy. I don't get MS employee pricing but I do maintain my MS Technet Subscription which makes a lot of this a bit easier on the paycheck.

The main reason I did the visio and picture stuff is because words can lose alot. If there is something in those that someone sees and they only need a piece, by all means only use that piece. I am not saying mine is the only way, in fact, quite the opposite other than sharing drives almost every setup is different in my opinion, just like corporate networks.

Because I only know the basics of networking (i.e I can set up a home network so all the PC's/gadgets can get online and see each other) I don't think setting up a server would be the best solution for me, I think getting something like this http://go.iomega.com/en/products/network-attached-storage-nas/ix2/ix2/#overviewItem_tab and, from what I can tell from the review on TechRadar it's easy to set up almost "plug and play".

dissposablehero wrote:

Because I only know the basics of networking (i.e I can set up a home network so all the PC's/gadgets can get online and see each other) I don't think setting up a server would be the best solution for me, I think getting something like this http://go.iomega.com/en/products/network-attached-storage-nas/ix2/ix2/#overviewItem_tab and, from what I can tell from the review on TechRadar it's easy to set up almost "plug and play".

WHS does the networking setup for you pretty much.

A NAS is good solution for entry into this but at some point you may start running out of room. So something more like a Drobo may keep the expansion blues from hitting home. Even linux has some good utilities for Disk Extender type functionality. You can use the pieces Amahi uses without buying the Amahi space bucks, hence the joy of open source.

Keep in mind I didn't stand all this up at one time. I've run a domain since I started my cert track back in 2001. I've had WHS running to back up my clients since 2007 when I buddy showed me Vista MC. So for a year I ran Vista MC with non QAM (I didn't realize what that second coax input was on the Aver card I had, besides Vista didn't have native QAM support anyway), and don't get me wrong, MC with non-QAM was a step down in fidelity from the ReplayTV we had previously but it was still 'good enough' because we only had a 24" CRT TV and the replay was dying. When Linksys and buddies dropped out of the extender market I got one from Amazon when they were selling the DMA 2100's for $75 (I should have bought more).
When W7 came out and I figured out QAM it was a whole new world. I saved up for the Ceton 4 card and pre-ordered one but augmented the Aver card with an HD Homerun. That lasted me until we switched entertainment centers at which point orienting the pc sideways ate through my original card and a second one. I went back to the Aver card/HD Homerun until the external Ceton came out and I was back in the saddle.

I have no regrets and over time as you've said it gets expensive. The main issue going forward for me now is that Microsoft has pretty much killed off Media Center so unless BillG or SteveB come down from heaven and resurrect it I'm going to have to migrate to something else (XBMC most likely) when the final blows come. The non Xbox extenders are much quieter than the xbox and a bit quicker but, except for Ceton, no one makes them any more (and Ceton's just came out).

We're living in the future and it is good.

On the hardware side, the one note of caution I have is that you are using WD Green drives. Green drives do not work well in a RAID array (something I found out the hard way on my homebrew NAS) so I'd recommend getting WD RED's for that. They work fine if you just want a big disk pool though.

Seconding LouZiffer on the Plex Media Server and Roku combination. Although Plex gets a lot of hate for not giving back enough to XBMC, the UI is slick and consistent across all their first party apps which greatly improved the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) at my home.

I run Ubuntu so can't really comment on Server 2012 issues.

Eezy_Bordone wrote:

Even linux has some good utilities for Disk Extender type functionality.

Eezy - you don't need to use Amahi to get Disk Extender. That functionality is available in most linux flavors as LVM and there's a reasonable GUI (by Linux standards) available on Debian and Red Hat.

Here's an update

TexasRay wrote:

I discovered that by installing the connector software, it makes all kinds of changes to the laptop including setting the machine's DNS server to the WSE server's IP. I have two different routers at home and use one for my DNS, so on the laptop I set the primary DNS to be my router and the secondary to be the WSE server. This fixed the laptop's web browsing issues and also made it where it could connect to the server and see the media shares. I'm sure there's a better way to have it configured, but for now it seems to work.

This turned out to be a very temporary solution. The connector software has a process that runs every few hours and resets your IP configuration to point back to the server. This resulted in an angry wife who would lose internet and have to have me fix it or walk her thru the steps to fix it if I wasn't home. Due to work and other distractions, it took me several days to find the solution which was to install the DNS role on the server and then have it forward lookup to the router gateway. The DNS setup wizard was simple and understandable and that seems to have completely fixed the laptop connectivity issue. My wife sometimes complains about the internet being slow, but we have AT&T Uverse, so I blame them for the sporadic slowness.

TexasRay wrote:

I tried playing movies from rips on the XBox video player and it didn't work. It could see the server and media shares w/out issue, but that was it. (It could see my MP3 library with all the info, so that was nice.) This morning, I tried getting the XBox to see and play the MP4 but it couldn't find it. I also tried playing the MP4 over the network on the wife's laptop's media player and that didn't seem to work either.

This turned out to be a network issue. I have a UVerse router and a DLink router. Wireless devices (1 xbox, tablets, phones, laptops) were using the DLink while wired devices (2 xboxes, 3 DTV DVR's, server, MyBook NAS) were using the UVerse router. I reconfigured things to have all wired and wireless traffic use the DLink and then the DLink uses the UVerse router as it's gateway. Down the road, I may look at segmenting traffic so that streaming from the server to laptops won't affect XBox Live type traffic, but that is beyond my networking knowhow right now and we don't have any issues related to that yet.

Now that everything seems to be working, I am very pleased with the ease at which I can get DVD ripped and have it available to my XBoxes. Basically, I walk by the server in my gameroom and if the DVD tray is open, I put in a movie that I want ripped and close it. When it is done ripping, the tray ejects and I can put in another one whenever I think about it. Behind the scenes, after ripping is completed MyMovies kicks off transcoder job that transcodes it to .MP4 and dumps it in my Movie library share. I don't have to do anything on the server or manually move files around. Granted, the transcoding takes a while, but that isn't a big deal to me as long as it is available whenever I'm in the mood to watch something. We have watched several movies from the server and it works great - the video quality is on par with a decent Netflix stream and that is fine with me.

Along the same lines, I did run into an issue with our home movies. Our DSLR and our camcorder produce movies in .MOV or .MPG format and those formats DO NOT stream to the xbox (without WMC or other middleware). To fix this, I got Any Video Converter and did a huge batch of all of our movies over the course of a few days. Ideally, I'd have an app that worked just like my MyMovies, but took data off of an SD card and dump still picts into our family picture folder and put movies in a directory that a transcoder was watching and that would automagically do everything. I will probably tinker with some scripts or maybe even write my own WSE12 plugin similar to MyMovies.

Now, my next two challenges are to find a means to copy/merge MP3 and photo librarys from various laptops to a single source on the server. Basically, my wife and I have MP3 and photo collections on our laptops and there is some overlap. I'd like something that would take all the MP3s/picts from both laptops and dump them in a central location on the server. I suspect that I'll have to find/write some scripts to do this.

Also, I'd like to try streaming movies from the server to our Nook Color and Nook HD tablets. Based on the suggestions here, I will try XBMC and report back.

avggeek wrote:

On the hardware side, the one note of caution I have is that you are using WD Green drives. Green drives do not work well in a RAID array (something I found out the hard way on my homebrew NAS) so I'd recommend getting WD RED's for that. They work fine if you just want a big disk pool though.

Seconding LouZiffer on the Plex Media Server and Roku combination. Although Plex gets a lot of hate for not giving back enough to XBMC, the UI is slick and consistent across all their first party apps which greatly improved the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) at my home.

I agree about WD Reds Vs Greens.

I also agree on Plex + Roku. I have an iMac with 19TB of external storage hooked up running Plex that streams to two Roku XSs on my TVs (living room and bedroom). We cut cable, still have a Tivo HD for live sports on the unencrypted HD streams in the living room.