Next stage of my first business customer, getting a server set-up (storage, sage etc)

DJMK4

DJMK4

DJMK4

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Hi all,

OK obviously putting my main job to the side I do a bit of work on the side targetting home users however one of these clients turned in to a business client and is a friend of family.

They have recently set-up a small warehouse where they are manufacturing items for diggers, didnt really get involved much with their ADSL or line install's, they seemed to happily get someone in to fit some RJ45 faceplates etc and run downs to the comm's cabinets.

I have set-up 4 x Dell workstations for them to which I have already invoiced them, at the time as they were start up he didn't have a server although I did recommend this being something that would become essential fairly quickly.......He's been trading some months now and its around the time to buy a server

So, how many users does he have there working on machines?

He currently has 3 but may stretch to 5 but wanting the footroom to allow more user licences

What's the server going to be used for?


Obviously I have recommended the setup of the server for centralisation (non-domain), file server, print server, possibly some web related services VPN (maybe) DHCP, however he also wants to run sage off this. Now I have no knowledge of sage tbh, I have done some minor changes in the past but its not something I do.

At present, they have sage installed on two of the workstations at this unit to which they have accounting data on, and have to back up etc, ideally we want to ditch this, utilise the server so that the users can RDP to the server with their own login, and load up Sage, once they get to the login, they can login with their Sage ID's.

I guess the sage data runs off SQL databases etc ?

How easy would it be to get this server up and running, install sage on the server, create some users and bring the data that they are currently using over on to the new sage set-up? They have a guy in house who sets up the sage stuff for them but he only knows how to set-up the accounting data within the software, I dont think he knows how to network sage centrally.

it's not something I want to be doing to be honest but if its an easy thing to do then I could be quids in, if not then I will set-up the server and the rest of the stuff, and they will have to outsource their sage stuff from someone else

Any help appriciated :)

Also if anyone has seen any good server deals going about at the moment (extra cookies if OS is available) then let me know :) I am going to start hunting around when I get a sec, is the Microserver worthy of fitting in to this small business set-up or should I go for the beefier one.
 
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This is how I have set-up Sage which is quite low resource wise. If you copy the Company.000 directory to the server. Sage data is internal no SQL externally.

Then edit in C:\Program Data\Sage\Accounts\2012 on the local machine and look for the file named company in notepad ++ and change the path statement to reflect the network share of the server.

All data will then be saved on the server. Just make sure you backup before you do any of this. That means getting the user to do a normal backup inside Sage and also for you to back up the entire structure of Company.000 to be sure.

Any time you do a backup of sage through the program it will restore a fresh install to a previous state, but if you have different custom layouts/reports for the company they will not be present so backup the whole structure just in case. The only trouble you might have is with the quick print invoice not working. If you have default quick report set-up at all. Just go to settings off the menu in sage invoice and order defaults and check the quick print points to your selected invoice layout. I have found this to be glitchy when restoring backups from other machines which are local and then moved to this arrangement. If it works out of the box then disregard this.

The Microserver will handle the Sage no problems, also it will run something like Untangle in a VM as a router come level 7 Unified Threat Manager. I would really recommend this setup works faultlessly and you know you are protected. When you install Untangle though use Virtual box and when it trys to install packages close it and then select the Lite package which is free. Or you could install the standard package and try some extra features for 1 month, but the Lite package should handle what you want for now. You will have to buy an Intel CT PCI-E adapter to marry with the Broadcom Adapter as you will require two interfaces. Untangle is a doodle to set up and configure as most of it is done for you it's a really great package. When it boots it takes a while and CPU will reach 100% for a long while don't worry afterwards it's good to go with no problems it will stop spyware, ads, web filter, viruses the lot and has Open VPN built in.

I have this setup works great although in a VM it is limited to around 50Mbps down CPU wise, but gives 19Mbps up. I also RDP into it all the time to access Sage etc.

Hope this helps :)
 
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Thanks for this info gives me a bit of an insight :) I will reply with a more lengthy response at some point but I'm on my phone at the moment and battery about to go

what I might do is take a p2v of one of their workstations or atleast do this backup or sage data. Ill then create a VM on my host at home to play around with. How does sage licensing work? Do you think I will be able to use their install disk etc on my test lab if i setup xp machine and a windows server running sage?
 
TheBiznes is quite right and the MicroServer will be more than ample.

I've installed a few HP MicroServers into business of 3 - 7 users, with 2 - 3 users accessing Sage Accounts and Sage PayRoll. The server also acts as a data share for a central drive and also a backup of users' individual documents and archived emails; which I set to run daily with a couple of machines backing up at 17.30, then the remainder at 18.00.

The servers have been installed for 6 - 12 months and I've had two calls from each of them, from unrelated issues and they have been incredible pleased with the functionality.
 
Ok, think I may go for this then :) just not sure what OS and licensing costs :/ I don't want to scare him off with high prices

Ill do some more research tomorrow and let you know what I come up with, but any testing I can get done now the better really in a lab with regards to sage, then I can roll out
 
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I have two clients that use Sage. I have done as suggested above, that is, only moved the Sage data to a share on the server (in both cases they are using SBS 2011). You keep the Sage install on the local machine(s) and point the installs to pick up the data from the network share rather than locally. The share is then backed up as part of the nightly server backup - I've had to restore company files several times when someone did something silly. I have recommended they also do their own Sage backup to a memory stick, just in case (but this is often not done in my experience).

If you wanted to run Sage on a "server", you'd need to look at doing something like a RDS gateway... but for 3-5 users (probably not all of them using Sage) that might be overkill.
 
Cool thanks then that makes things even simpler than I thought migrating the data to a share and pointing their local sage installs to the data.

Thanks all :)

So it's the company000 directory, assuming that both machines have the same data, I should be able to pick up the directory and just swing
It over.
 
Arranging with the guy to stick the sage data on a disk for me, he is also going to hand me the install media

Time to get some test VM's set-up :) going to have a look around for some Microservers, additional memory and drives later
 
Just a FYI, if this is Line50 with a reasonable amount of data it runs fairly poorly but reliably over a network when generating reports. IIRC it uses something like, if not an Access back end. They were going to make a version between Line50 and (100 or 200) that used MySQL but they binned it unfortunately. Our install has more than 5 companies on it, plus consolidation accounts and processes a lot of transactions daily. For general use this is fine. This is on a gigabit network with a server using 15k SAS drives.
 
OK collected the sage installation DVD off them today, and took a USB external HDD down, they have done a backup directly to my external HDD

So I am just in the preparation of testing this in my lab environment now.

Will let you know if I run in to any issues.
 
Hardware I have selected for them is

HP Microserver NL40
Crucial 8GB DDR3 1333Mhz Ballistix Sport Memory
1TB WD 1TB Green SATAIII 64MB Cache (can add additional drives at a later date)

Going and also chuck in a 500GB external HDD to start with for backups, if they want to add another one and do the backup rotation then they can go ahead with this.

Does this seem ok?

I was going to plonk a 2TB drive in there which is around £70 for their data instead of 1, but I guess they can always add to it.

Want to try and save money where possible as then I can apply the savings to the service cost of setting it up
 
Is it absolutely essential? They are not the biggest of setup a, quite small, can't see them
Holding a lot of data, I have a good backup plan in place, if I decided to go down the raid route could utilise 250gb included drive for OS then say 2 x 1 TB HDDs ?
 
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DJMK4 said:
Is it absolutely essential? They are not the biggest of setup a, quite small, can't see them
Holding a lot of data, I have a good backup plan in place, if I decided to go down the raid route could utilise 250gb included drive for OS then say 2 x 1 TB HDDs ?
Click to expand...

Sounds like a good plan if you don't mind rebuilding the OS if a disk fails. You'd ideally want to go with the WD RE series (RE4s at the moment) or Seagate Constellation drives. They are great drives and designed for 24/7 use along with all the additional enterprise features. You could also, if they don't have huge date, get some smaller RE4s (they start at 250GB) to get the redundancy.
 
DJMK4 said:
Is it absolutely essential? They are not the biggest of setup a, quite small, can't see them
Holding a lot of data, I have a good backup plan in place, if I decided to go down the raid route could utilise 250gb included drive for OS then say 2 x 1 TB HDDs ?
Click to expand...

I'd say its essential for the sake of another £50-£100 at most. The cost to the business of downtime whilst you recover their server will be hugely more than this, plus your labour costs on top. When using consumer hard disks in a 24/7 server, you can be pretty much sure of a failure over the servers lifetime at some point so the more redundancy you can add the better.

As it will effectively being done in software raid, someone will need to check on it every so often in the disk management plug in to make sure none of the disk's have failed. Make it their responsibility to check every so often so they cant blame you for any failures that have gone unnoticed. Proper RAID cards will email you with any problems but they're £200+.
 
DJMK4 said:
Is it absolutely essential? They are not the biggest of setup a, quite small, can't see them
Holding a lot of data, I have a good backup plan in place, if I decided to go down the raid route could utilise 250gb included drive for OS then say 2 x 1 TB HDDs ?
Click to expand...

Yes, I would say it is essential. Given this is a side line for you, can you escape your day job to go and replace a failed HD, then rebuild the server?

Go with a mirror of 250GBs for the OS (RE4s or Constellations as mentioned previously), then maybe another mirror for the data.

Server 2012 Foundation or Essentials should fit the bill for the OS. Neither requires CALs so keeps costs down as the business grows.
 
Prices are starting to go up a bit when you add all
The drives, can i utilise the drive that comes with it? Or obviously this is not going to be suited for one that runs 24/7.

So what am I looking at 2 x 250gb mirror and 2 x 1tb mirror?
 
You could, to keep costs down, just have a single RAID1 (1TB I guess) and just partition some of (80GB?) for the OS. Although not ideal, for a small business it should be fine. Just take it to account you'll need some sort of quick replacement if a disk does fail. Onsite spares maybe?

As people have said above, as this is something you are doing on the side you can't just be jumping out of work randomly to fix these problems. A little money up-front will help out in the long term, for both you and the customer. I assume these are all items that you are going to be invoicing them for anyway?
 
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