Hands on with Windows Aurora
by Kris Sum on Aug.25, 2010, under Technical
Aurora is Microsoft’s new server system aimed at startup/small businesses, a cross between Windows Home Server and a full Small Business Server setup.
We look at the installation process, key features, and take a look under the hood
Aurora is currently in beta, so some of the things you see here may not make it into the final version. It has the windows 7 GUI, so we can expect much of the stuff in Aurora to be present in SBS 7 (aka SBS 2010).
Installation and Setup
The setup process is much the same as sbs2008 but with a windows 7 feel. Drive partitioning and formatting options are gone (much like windows home server):
After the file transfer, you’ll be rebooted into the proper setup screen:
Above, you’ll see the basic AD domain information that will be used.
The desktop
Logging in for the first time we can see a windows 7ish desktop, with powershell and server manager pinned to the taskbar:
Quite neat and tidy. Before going into the dashboard, lets see what the installer did to the hard disk…
If you ignore our secondary HDD “DATA_STORE”, Aurora has created serveral other drives from W to Z for what looks like separate file shares. OK that’s fine, they all have the same disk space so where are they mounted?
Leaving 60GB for the OS, the rest of the drive is labelled DE Disk and formatted as FAT32 ?!?! Curiouser and curiouser… this must be where the other ‘drives’ are mounted, so what’s the technology behind it?
There’s an XML file in the DriveExtender (i.e. DE) folder on the root of the OS drive, this is what seems to be controlling the extra drive mounts.
Notice how as the filesystem is fat32, security is stored in the XML file. As with windows home server, I assume that adding extra storage drives gives the drive extending software more storage space for it to store it’s files, without having to do any partitioning or moving of data. I guess this is going to eventually integrate with the cloud, though that part of the system is noticeably absent…
The Dashboard / Console
The console is simpler and less cluttered than SBS 2008 and WHS, with server settings accessible from a single small link on the top navigation. Like WHS, this console supports add-ins (though none are currently available)
Pretty standard stuff, users / computers sections are much like SBS 2008.
Under the hood
There’s no Microsoft exchange to speak of, infact, nothing is mentioned about emails at all. Whether this is coming as some sort of cloud based addon i don’t know.
Group policies are extremely slimmed down – there are only two default policies defined:
No folder redirection or anything funky. Probably because they need a unified solution which works for Macs as well as Windows clients.
Macs you say? With windows server? Why yes! This screenshot proves it:
Very interesting indeed!
Stay tuned for the next post, where we look at the client / end user experience for both windows and mac users …