This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
I started with the original Windows Home Server, then upgraded to Windows Home Server 2011 (Vail) after it was released.
I had intended to stick with WHS2011 when I upgraded my server but found it only supports 1 CPU socket and 8GB of memory, much less than my upgraded server had.
Server 2012 Essentials is a worthy upgrade to Windows Home Server 2011. It not only supports both CPU sockets in my new server, it also supports all of its RAM as well. The Dashboard interface is improved from WHS2011 but not too different as to make it difficult to navigate.
Storage Spaces is the replacement for the original WHS Drive Extender and is supposed to be a lot better, but I'm not using it yet as I just migrated my Drive Bender pool in to the new server.
A few things to note:
1. Setting up WHS2011 you'll be setting up a domain. There are kludges around this, but I decided to do it since domain gives you more features like folder redirection (essentially cloud-like folder mirroring across machines).
2. I had trouble connecting to the server via the Connector at first, and after some searching found I needed to add the server's IP as a DNS server for my clients. Since it's a domain controller it wants to control everything. ;-)
3. Since it's a domain you'll end up with a new user profile on your client machines. It won't necessarily transfer preferences and such to the new account, so be prepared to manually migrate settings and such depending on which OS you're using. If you have access to a Windows 7 machine, the Migration Wizard will still work on Windows 10 if you copy it over from a Windows 7 machine. The Windows 8 Easy Transfer tool will probably also work as well.
