Homeserver Forum

Q: Support for x64 home computers has obviously been a big challenge for the team. Could you explain how tricky this issue has been?

Todd: The challenge really comes down to resources and priorities It had been our intention all along to provide great x64 home computer support in v1 of Windows Home Server.

As some of you may know, one of the great things about the x64 versions of Windows is the WOW64 layer that enables almost every 32 bit application to “just work”. It is quite amazing, actually. For our small product group, being able to ride on the shoulders of giants by running our 32 bit code under WOW64 enables us to be very efficient. Up until late last year our solution was working great on x64 Vista in this manner.

However, as we were preparing Windows Home Server Beta 2 in December we discovered that the Vista team, right before it released, had made a change to the Volume Snapshot Services that broke ALL 32 bit applications trying to use VSS on the x64 versions of the operating system. They made this change to fix another bug that they deemed more serious. The end result is that no 32 bit backup software (that use VSS, and most do) would run on x64 Vista machines.

We believed that this bug in Vista would be promptly fixed and a hot fix or service release issued and we’d be good to go. It turns out that this was not possible, so we were put into the position of having to re-engineer the Windows Home Server connector software as a native x64 application, and greatly expand our testing efforts. We did not have the resources to complete this by the time we RTM’d Windows Home Server.

The team has released an alpha version of the x64 connector code to Microsoft employees, and we would like to release it as part of the product with the first “minor” release (Code Name “UR1”) of Windows Home Server.