KDB Systems

Microsoft has a new ver­sion of Small Busi­ness Server which will be launched on Novem­ber 12. It’s called Small Busi­ness Server 2008. I was in the beta test­ing pro­gram for this and I’m quite excited about it. Sim­i­lar to 2003 there are two edi­tions, Stan­dard and Pre­mium. Stan­dard includes: Server 2008 64 bit, Exchange 2007 Stan­dard Edi­tion, Share­Point Ser­vices 3.0, WSUS 3.0, and all the stan­dard SBS fea­tures like RWW, as well as the stan­dard lim­i­ta­tions like 75 users max. Pre­mium adds a sec­ond full Server 2008 license (32 or 64 bit) and SQL Server 2008 Stan­dard. The Client Access Licenses (CALs) are a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. There are dif­fer­ent CALS for the Stan­dard and Pre­mium Edi­tions with the Pre­mium CALs being a lit­tle more expen­sive. CALs are avail­able in mul­ti­ples of one rather than the min­i­mum of five in 2003. It is based on Server 2008 so by default it’s more secure than the pre­vi­ous ver­sion based on Server 2003. It is 64 bit only which means it can address more RAM, 32 GB vs. 4 GB for 2003. When 2003 was released RAM was expen­sive and 32 bit server OS’s were the norm. This is no longer the case. 4 GB can be a major choke point with a heav­ily loaded SBS server. The sec­ond server license in Pre­mium is a very nice addi­tion. This allows you to run SQL or what­ever on a sec­ond server rather than try­ing to run it all on the SBS server. Many Line of Busi­ness appli­ca­tions don’t sup­port run­ning on a domain con­troller which means they are not sup­ported run­ning on an SBS server. The sec­ond server is also capa­ble of run­ning Hyper-V, Server 2008’s vir­tu­al­iza­tion role. The sec­ond server is licensed to be installed as the par­ent and also as a child. This means you can install a decent server with lots of RAM, use the sec­ond server as the par­ent with the Hyper-V role enabled, and both SBS and another Server 2008 instance in child par­ti­tions (vir­tual machines). When I was beta test­ing SBS 2008 I did this and actu­ally had three child par­ti­tions. One of them was run­ning Untan­gle, an open source firewall/gateway. On a small net­work of 25 users a server with a cou­ple of decent Xeon CPUs and 16 GB of RAM could eas­ily run all of this on one box.
All in all SBS 2008 is a good prod­uct, well suited to a small busi­ness of ten to sixty users. If you grow beyond that you can migrate to the new Essen­tial Busi­ness Server 2008 or the full Enter­prise ver­sions of Server 2008, Exchange, SQL, etc. Kudos to the SBS devel­op­ment team for a great product.