Novice server questions

[bertles86]

Hi folks,

I'm an experienced IT/Hardware technician but know very little about servers.

I am looking for your help and advice on explaining the best server solution for a small business, with roughly 10-12 end-users.

We currently have this setup:

Networked Ricoh SME Multi-function Printer
Western Digital My World 1TB NAS Drive
Several Windows 7 Home Premium PC's (mostly custom builds)
Several " " Laptops
Microsoft Online Services (Exchange/SharePoint Online): soon to be O365

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I would love anyone's input into where we go from here, as the business grows, we add more stations and the NAS will eventually grind to a halt. I am looking at some sort of IBM/Custom Rackmount Server (We have a small office rack with network switches/rackmount router etc.) running Windows Storage Server 2008 R2...is this the right direction?

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Would the following make sense:

Rackmount Server with a Xeon CPU + 4 x 2TB WD HDD's
Windows Storage Server 2008 R2

Do end-user stations (PC's/Laptops) need to also run the Server OS or can they keep their Home Premium/Professional Editions and access the storage via the Storage OS?

Will the printer integrate through the server or simply remain connected directly to the network switch?

Finally would our Quickbooks (Account S/W) company file be able to be stored and accessed from the server? As currently we host this from a standard PC so it must remain on and logged in for others to access Quickbooks.

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Any help for a novice server-ite greatly appreciated.

 

[slylittlefox]

What's your budget?

It's my understanding that storage server was only necessary if you were wanting to use iSCSI and the like? All the other features can be implemented in vanilla 2008 AFAIK (as indeed can iSCSI etc). Though someone should be able to confirm that for definite.

Regardless, judging by what you have now, I'd say a decent pedestal server from Dell or HP would do you (and avoid you having to shell out on racks/PDUs/etc just yet - your small office rack sounds as if it could just be a comms cabinet?).

Then install ESXi, have a VM running SBS2008 (or standard if you don't want Exchange/SharePoint functionality, and don't mind setting up AD/DNS yourself), then a separate VM running QuickBooks. You could even just convert the QuickBooks machine into a VM if you didn't want to mess about setting a new one up.

If budget allows, get two servers (the second can afford to be not as highly spec'ed) - backup the VMs nightly to the NAS and you'd have a standby server should anything goes drastically wrong.

As for your printer, entirely up to you, but you could share it via the server and have it deployed automatically to the office PCs. Centralising management is the name of the game after all

HTH!

 

[bertles86]

Ok thanks Sly, there's some good stuff there.

So budget, no real ceiling so long as it's applicable my boss would go for it.

Through MOS we have access to licenses for MS Small Business Server Essentials and Standard.

But as I understand the basics, we install a Server OS onto the Server, and the client machines remain using their Client OS such as Windows 7 Professional...is that correct?

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Essentially I could get a small server with a fair bit of storage used for file/folder centralisation, printer sharing and QB sharing, with the NAS setup for automated nightly backups of all the data?

Is that about right?

 

[slylittlefox]

But as I understand the basics, we install a Server OS onto the Server, and the client machines remain using their Client OS such as Windows 7 Professional...is that correct?

Yep that's correct mate

Essentially I could get a small server with a fair bit of storage used for file/folder centralisation, printer sharing and QB sharing, with the NAS setup for automated nightly backups of all the data?

Is that about right?

Yep sounds it to me, it's what I'd do. Definitely recommend using ESXi - there's negligible performance impact in environments such as this, and it will make upgrading/expanding so much easier in the future (and comes with a host of other benefits)

 

[bremen1874]

It's worth noting that you'll need Win 7 Professional or better if you want the PCs to connect to a domain.

You NEED to have a robust offsite backup system in place. Only having onsite backups is a disaster waiting to happen.

A decent UPS is always a good thing to have.

Unless you’re a really tight budget don’t use anything less than 10K SAS drives (and a decent hardware RAID controller), sacrifice server processing power if necessary.

 

[#Chri5#]

My 2p:

Buy a branded server (either tower or rack) from HP / Dell / IBM. It's not worth the agro of building your own. I'm an HP ProLiant person, so perhaps an ML350 G6. Would suggest something along the lines of a quad core Xeon (2.0Ghz or higher), minimum of 12GB RAM (3x4GB). For storage something like a pair of 146GB SAS 10k (RAID mirror) for the OS (IIRC SBS 2011 setup asks for a partition of size of 120GB), then another array for user data (either a mirror or RAID5).

Have a look at SBS 2011 Essentials. Has a limit of 25 users and gives you some useful local things like Active Directory etc but then use Office 365 for Exchange (e-mail) etc. MS are meant to integrate SBS Essentials / Office 365 fully later this year:

The integration module will enable small businesses to simply administer their users both local and cloud in one single place, for instance adding all local users into Office 365 and effortlessly using a single custom domain name for both SBSS 2011 Essentials and Office 365.

We have a customer running Quickbooks on an SBS 2008 server, so you might not need the virtual machine other people have mentioned.

As Bremen1874 says, your backup stratergy needs to include getting data off-site. SBS 2011 will backup to USB HDs (it doesn't support tape), or could you look at a 3rd party product like Backup Assist which has more features.

 

[Rob7865]

^^
This !