Vail Public Beta Refresh Available

Windows Home Server code name "Vail" has had its Public Preview refreshed, and very good it is too.

New in this latest build is:

• Alert Email integration – configure the server to send alerts via Email
• Previous Versions for Server Folders are turned on by default and are exposed in folder properties
• Silverlight 4 support for media
• MAC Support for all MAC lovers
• A SDK Preview which provides API references, how-to build add-in documents, templates for Visual Studio 2010 and samples of complete add-ins.
• PLUS much much more.

But make sure you read ALL the available documentation as there are quite a few issues with this beta software, including:

• Install QFE KB2314472 which addresses an issue where saving files to a server shared folder may fail with a time-out or sharing violation error when a large amount of data, typically more than 1TB, is present on the server. After you install the server software, and before you copy any data to the server’s folders, download and install QFE KB2314472.
• Drive Extender data from earlier Vail beta versions are incompatible with this version as the low-level data format for Drive Extender has changed with this release and is no longer compatible with data written by Drive Extender in earlier versions of Vail. Drives that were used as part of a server storage pool in an earlier version of Vail will show a status of incompatible version in the Hard Drives tab of the Dashboard. Incompatible hard drives can still be added to the default storage pool, but all data on the hard drive will be lost. So before installing this version, make sure you copy all server folder data from server storage to an external USB drive or to a client computer. After installing, copy the data back to the server storage folders.

As always you can get your copy from Microsoft’s Connect site.

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