SBS 2011 Vs 2k8 R2 + Exchange

[dave-lew99]

I'm in a situation where we're looking at purchasing Exchange in some form or another.

Obviously SBS is nice and cheap, will suit us (5 users) and can be had with a suitable server for around £1,500.

As a bonus it also comes with Sharepoint Foundation.

The trouble is, putting it all on one box (so that's DNS, DHCP, AD, Exchange, Sharepoint) feels risky both from a stability (having lots of services) and security point of view (no possible isolation of public bits (eg SMTP) from the rest).

Is it worth pushing for the alternative - shaping up to be 2x Win 2k8 R2s, 2x Exchange 2010 and 2 boxes to run it on, plus CALS...

Since the recommended deployment of Exchange 2010 is a min of two boxes, do you have to buy two Exchange licences?

Obviously something like £5k is a lot more than £1.5k! Plus you lose sharepoint, although i'm not sure how much we'd use that anyway.

 

[dave-lew99]

Unfortunately due to some contractual and security obligations we have to keep it in-house...

Hosted was the plan up until recently

Growth wise, not a lot maybe a couple of people in the next 12 months.

 

[dave-lew99]

My rough estimate of £1.5k was for a Dell rackmount box based on SBS '08 pricing. We don't really need rackmount but it would be nice to head that way.

It also included RAID-1 SAS for disks and i think 6GB RAM.

I thought the recommended RAM for SBS 2011 was 8GB? I have squeezed it into my dev VM box to try out at 4GB and it hasn't complained.

In terms of reliability of one box, it's less the hardware more the software i'm worried about - piling all those interacting services into one place just makes me nervous.

I hadn't considered the option of a SMTP gateway to seperate it from the real world, that seems like a good option as next on my list is a new network gateway/security appliance.

 

[dave-lew99]

Thanks for the info

Backup wise, currently i do an automatic nightly backup of key data on a rolling 7-day to our fileserver with an offsite done monthly or so. I'm likely to step this up - at the moment it's a bit labourious to zip, encrypt and burn several CDs (no tape!)

SBS i understand has enough built in backup to cover email, sharepoint etc.

Since we need a new network gateway/security appliance then we might as well get one which will do email too, or even keep out existing Postfix box to do relaying/scanning.

I did a risk mitigation exercise this afternoon on the probable services which would run on the SBS box and it seems straightforward to comfortably cover these in the event of a short outage.

I may look at speccing a slightly better than required box so i can at least put it into a VM - are there any problems with doing this with SBS?

 

[dave-lew99]

Great stuff.

I will make sure the box is reasonbly well specced (raid, redundant PSU), plus i'll try and wedge a UPS in there. Timescales for this project are ever extending so we'll probably just limp along as we are for a while yet.

In terms of contiuity of service we have several things we can do -

* Use another SMTP server as a proxy/cache in case Exchange is down
* Run BIND and replicate the whole of DNS as a secondary DNS server
* Leave DHCP on the router (currently done by DNSMasq)

Those simple steps will at least mean we don't lose any mail plus internet access isn't interrupted for short outages.

I'll probably run it in ESXi as the only VM on the box - we already have an ESXi box so it does mean if there is a problem we can just transfer the VM's back and forth (albeit manually, but that in a lot of cases will still be quicker than repairing the fault). Plus it means in the future we can add capacity by simply copying the image to a more powerful server and avoid most of the work in migrating systems.

For a security gateway i've been looking at the Watchguard products (specifically the XTM 505 w/Security bundle), seems well specced and well priced, although i have no experience of the product. (Then again, who wouldn't want a bright red box in their rack! )