Current experiments
I’ve set up a home server based on the amahi platform. The whole package looks a whole lot better than the Windows Home Server. It also seems more easy to manage. It streams to my itunes on my mac, to my windows media player and even to my x-box. Like with windows home server everything is managed via a web interface. Extra packages are a breeze to install such as the bittorrent client, ical server and others. The system is based on one of the new intel atom boards. It supports a maximum amount of 4GB in the memory department, and carries the new current gen atom and chipset which uses even less power.
I have also been experimenting with the Windows Server 2008 R8 trial. I’ve managed to set up a virtualized environment for remote desktop services. The construction consists of 4 servers. One is the domain controllers, two others are remote desktop session hosts and the last one is the web access/gateway/broker server. This setup allows me to distribute workloads between the two remote desktop session host servers. More information about Remote Desktop Services can be found here.
I have also found out that it is possible to display remote apps that you’ve created on the Remote Web Workplace of the Small Business Server 2008. It is also possible to do this via the companyweb website. This makes the usage of an extra server (using the premium license) extra interesting for people who are working out of office. I still have to implement these things though in a test environment. I’ll be sure to report back here with the results of the experiment. I really like small business server 2008, I believe it’s one of microsoft’s best products to date.