I were looking forward to SBS2008, until I read the specs last week, minimum RAM is 4GB, except for people buying new server and have that op to spec the memory, I doubt many of our customers would bother to upgrade, many SBS2003 we serve runs happily on 1GB, I know its 64bit, but the 4GB minimum must meant to make it really work, you will need 6 or even 8GB, something doesnt compute even with whatever new features they have within, is this another case of lazy programming ?

But if, say you need to connect all your users to a machine running:

SBS: 1089+70 cals= 6479

EBS: 1899+200 cals (not the 300 supported): 39699

plus the new hardware, of course.

(Please, correct if I'm wrong in my maths, as I did them very quickly)

Not trying to sound anti ms or open source fanboy, but at this prices, for struggling business... I'm not sure they will "woo" many customers.

Try to convince an inexperienced manager of a family owned company (as lots of small to medium sized business), that he has to pay for the hardware, the software and the right to connect the machines he already has...

R

So in financially difficult times small businesses should shell out for more hardware and overpriced software? Why do that when they could run Linux better on old hardware with no software cost?

Mine's the one with free open source Zimbra running on £200 hardware.

New 2x quad core opteron (2Ghz) 8gb Ram mirrored 400gb SAS 10k Drives

From Dell special offer to resellers £1k + Change and Vat

1 M$ technet subscription £188 + VAT (20% off special at the moment)

As much M$ software and cals as you can eat (for long term evaluation not production environment of course)

1 New gigabit 24 port switch

No worries about pirate licences or wondering if FACT (or whatever they are called these days) are gonna come busting through your door

Result - happy bean counter - happy staff now we can burn flaky old OLD server - happy boss now I’m not bugging him to buy new server - Happy Me - GTA 4 is out for PC now - now more holding old crappy system together with prayer and bailing twine

Anon for obvious reasons

Is it me or are CALs a rip off. It's really just ms server tax, isn't it? To think that you can download an enterprise class *nix variant that you can use for free. Even dare I say Apple has a more attractively priced solution. Ok, so you'd end up paying a support fee to someone for *nix or apple, but you have to get a support contract with ms server too! You have to hand it to bill and his friends, through fur most sme's won't touch linux and see apple as too pricey. Looks like ms will win again.

Wow, global economic recession an MS wants to rip people off for what is most likely buggy, insecure and generally shite software.

I think the genetics research institute I work at will be sticking with our debian cluster thank you.

Why?

SBS is reasonably priced, especially with the SQL option just go try out reporting services which is a stonking tool for the price point. What SBS offers that *inx versions dont normally is:

* Exchange - so thats shared address lists, shared calendars, task etc :)

* Previous versions - users can right click on a file and recover a previous version without needing to call IT. I support several companies remotely and this saves me talking them through putting a tape/disk back in the server.

* Sharepoint - web portal for sharing docs and notices with people, yay.

* Remote Web Workplace - terminal server access to your desktop from home, this is a major bonus of SBS.

* Standard - if your server is SBS you can always switch to a different support provider, if its *inx they may never have seen that variety before. Plus M$ do support calls for a fixed fee until it is resolved, which helps you sleep at night.

EBS bad?

Well it need 4 physical servers if you have the SQL running. the servers are as follows:

1 = SQL server - you dont want to put anything else on this box

2 = management server - you cant put anything else on this box.

3 = exchange server - Should really only be exchange

4 = DC and file server - this is where most stuff will end up I guess.

So thats 4 servers, but not a great deal of roll seperation as your file server either ends up on the DC or the exchange server. And the sharepoint/webserver will end up on one of those as well.

Oh and the cost is worse than buying seperate server versions! which is what we have just done.

1 x M$ Action Pack suscription = £200, savings of £10k+..

Funnily enough, in my experience Windows has proven to waste a hell of a lot more time than Linux when it comes to adminstration. It is really a case of using Windows if your time has little value, for me at least.

The time I spend installing, reinstalling, patching, running AV updates, working around bugs (like the fact Windows will skip some files without telling you if you tell it to copy too many at once) troubleshooting and securing from the myrid of security holes is so wasteful that even though my company (A SME with ~50 people no less, running MS SBS) pays me for the time I do, I still feel like I could have spent the time in a better way.

The only thing I can say is that while Windows is easier to set up initially (except WSUS, which I have been trying to get to work for the last 3 weeks), it is much more of a pain to maintain. I set up our main internal server to run Linux, took a week of setting up, and it has so far ran over 190 days without a reboot, and about 180 days since I had to even log in to it, let alone fix any problems. It just works.