Cost of installing SBS2008

Slime101

Slime101

Slime101

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Can anyone give me a rough idea of the cost of installing SBS2008 onto a small network of 4/5 pc's, 1 server - currently all working fine but feel the benefits of SBS are well worth moving to.

So, if i pay someone to come in and do it, how long do you expect it to take, and how much should it cost?
 
1 server install, 4 PC's no other complications I'd guess 1.5 - 2 days, I'm guessing you want exchange set up and some mail box's, also outlook configured on the 4 PC's, and a bit of data transfer. ALso user accounts and settings transfered.

You are likley to get charged £750 a day from a company but less from a 1 man band...

what benefits would you get from SBS, other than a slower server and higher support costs?
 
What state is the server hardware in? New and ready to install SBS? Much data to move onto the server? Any applications to install / test? Any existing e-mail PSTs etc to import to Exchange?

I'd typically plan on 1 to 2 days with a daily rate of £500 to £550.
 
If you're definitely going with SBS08 don't get any ideas about putting it on an el cheapo server; it will drive you insane, it's a complete disk/memory whore. If you're going with a cheaper server, try and get hold of SBS03.

If you don't need Exchange, I would bother with any of it and even if you do, hosted Exchange for five users probably works out massively cheaper over 3 years.
 
Guess it depends what sort of hardware you want, but I did one recently for a friend so didn't charge him for my time and it worked out at around £1600+VAT for hardware and software.

Obviously that was without any profit margins for me on the kit so again you may get quoted differently.

That was for a 4 user office, based on a little HP ML115 box, decent RAID card, some drives, extra RAM and a license for SBS2k8 and BackupExec and a couple of external drives to do some simple offsite backup with.

All in all it was about a days work to get the server built and installed and then another day spent moving his data across and setting up users etc.


If you're installing SBS2k8 just use exchange, why pay for one of the biggest features (and IMO one of the key reasons why you'd want it in the first place) and not even use it.
 
We dont need the hardware, it will go on our existing "server" machine hardware.

I dont particually care about exchange, we dont use calendars and emails are hosted with our domain and for so few users it seems overkill, when we gain more staff they are going to be xmas temps as we have changed the structure recently.

The things we want from it are roaming profiles, remote working capabilities, decent backup options and possibly SQL server although this depends on the new version of our bespoke software and what the programmer decides to use as our current one is written in foxpro (from a very long time ago!)
 
Slime101 said:
The things we want from it are roaming profiles, remote working capabilities, decent backup options and possibly SQL server although this depends on the new version of our bespoke software and what the programmer decides to use as our current one is written in foxpro (from a very long time ago!)
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Well IMO you're wasting one of the best features of the product then.

The collaboration and integration that you get from using exchange (as part of the whole SBS package) is very good.

My friend above didn't think they would use any of it and called it "overkill" but funnily enough now they have the services there they make full use of them.
 
I remain to be convinced - when i worked in a 2500 person organisation people used calendars, and it was hit and miss because not everyone put things in them, not everyone had enough access etc etc.

In our company, none of us are out of the office, we are all "office" based and dont travel to see clients - we are essentially a manufacturing company rather than a service industry.

Also the problems of running our own exchange server are that our internet connection is limited to ADSL (not even ADSL2) and we cannot have any other service where we are, the connection has its reliability problems and BT dont care about the crap equipment in the exchange because its only a small village!
 
What's the spec of the existing server? 2008 wants a minimum of 4GB RAM and is x64 only.

Running your own mail server isn't a problem TBH - we have numerous customers with a single ADSL connection and Exchange. We have a secondary mail server which queues messages for them should their ADSL die.
 
We only have 4Gb RAM in it, processor i dont know but its not that old so will be x64.

With the exchange thing could we still host the emails with our current hosting provider & webspace, and them pull them to the local exchange server, thus if the connection is down it will queue them as per your example?
 
How much ram does it need?? The server really doesnt do much?

There are also rarely 5 active users at any one time, you are more likely to find 2 concurrent users due to the other things people do!
 
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As I said in your last thread, if you run a server, run it on BRANDED server hardware.

Home build desktop machines running production Server environments are more of a headache than it is worth.
 
Slime101 said:
There is no difference between a dell branded box, and what we use....except ours didnt cost the earth!
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You do realise Dells are considered the cheap server hardware?

What kind of disk controller and redundancy does your box have?
 
Raid 5 with PERC 5i controller.

Dells are only cheap for vanilla boxes, you want a decent spec, more ram, an OS or god forbid a raid controller and the prices are far from cheap for what you get.
 
Slime101 said:
Raid 5 with PERC 5i controller.

Dells are only cheap for vanilla boxes, you want a decent spec, more ram, an OS or god forbid a raid controller and the prices are far from cheap for what you get.
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Sounds like you've just looked at list price.

As a new customer to Dell, spending less than £5k in one go, we got ~50% discount on the list price.

Call them up, and talk them down.
 
Hi all,

If you're not considering Exchange, then why SBS anyway.
If you're just in need of a server, here is what I would do:

- Consider HP Proliant ML115 or ML110. They are very cheap in the UK.
- 8GB of RAM , very cheap nowadays
- 4 WD black HD, 500GB or 750 GB each if that's enough for you.
- Use Raid 1+0 in ML 110 or Raid 5 in ML115

- Install Windows home server, very cheap price with 10 user's cal. The main reason for it is that it gives you a server base software based on windows server 2003 and the big plus is that you can backup all those pc's !

- Grap Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 and install aside Windows Home server. It's free and it will help you to setup an intranet environment.

This is the best solution I see for a small team in no need for exchange and at a very affordable price.

Mich

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Don't need exchange?

Don't install SBS. Simples.

If you are a small 5 man team I am not seeing the benefits of roaming profiles either, do you swap desks that much?

SBS will not give you a decent native backup option (In my mind) and you can do remote work using some simple port forwarding and RDP to thick clients, or just use something like LogMeIn.

Sounds like total overkill when you will not use exchange.
 
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