Today Microsoft has made available to the public, the Release Candidate build of Windows Home Server 2011.
This build is the first build made available without Drive Extender technology, and is the first build to officially reveal that “Vail” will indeed be called Windows Home Server 2011. (For those that remember, I blogged about this after some confusion during CES.)
Because there is no Drive Extender anymore, you will need to rely either on some form of RAID to increase your amount of available storage, or rely on a large single drive if you want lots of storage from the get go. Microsoft is not saying too much yet about what they and their OEMs strategy is around storage. Hopefully in the coming days and weeks we will know more.
As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated. Since this is a release candidate, not everything can or will be acted upon, but every bug report will be looked at. You can file bugs online through the Microsoft Connect website.
For the build number curious amongst us, this is build 8400.16385 and is available from Microsoft Connect today. The CRC and SHA1 hashes for the ISO have been posted below along with steps to check the integrity of the downloaded ISO.
Hashes for today’s release:
Volume label: GRMSHSxFRE_EN_DVD
CRC: 0xC191510A
SHA1: 0x65AB44627F12E6FC5268BE2ED9F5489CB98021DF
To run MSCDCRC against an ISO file that you have downloaded follow these steps.
- Download MSCDCRC to the same folder that you downloaded the Vail ISO to. (Click here to download MSCDCRC)
- Open a Command Prompt window and navigate to the folder from Step 1
- Type “MSCDCRC EN-US_WHS_PREM_InstallDVD.iso” (without quotes)
- The integrity check will take a few moments to complete. After the check is complete compare the CRC and SHA hashes to the hashes posted below
- If the hashes match then you have successfully downloaded the ISO
Tom on Tech 
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