Servers: What on which ones?!

[Over Clocker]

Hi guys,

For our small but growing business, we currently have 1x little piddly machine running Server 2003 and Exchange 2003, and is also the domain server.

We're looking at investing in a proper server now, but was wondering which applications should go on which server, so any suggestions would be great!

We would have 1x low end Xeon/2GB ram server, no raid or anything like that.

And, 1x Xeon Quad core, 4GB ram, Raid 5 etc.

Things we want to run:

Active Directory
Exchange 2007 (will need to move over from 2003)
Sharepoint Services
Blackberry Enterprise server
Random apps

We are thinking:

Low end server: AD, Sharepoint, Random Apps
High end server: Exchange 2007, and maybe virtualise the BES?

WHat do you guys think? Would the virtual server be okay? Also, what software would be the best for this?

The AD is only really there to support Exchange, there are no real domain logins really.

Thanks guys.

Mal

 

[Over Clocker]

For BES it is best not to have it on the same server as Exchange, and it won't work on a domain server so would need to be on a VM really.

Cheers guys!

Mal

 

[Over Clocker]

That's not entirely true, i have installed BES on an SBS server in the past. Although I'd DEFINITELY not recommend it.

Even better. This was an SBS server with next to no backup, with a RAID 0 system partition (yes i did tell them again and again how bad an idea it was )

But I've read it won't work without the BESAdmin account being a local admin account, so can't use a domain controller (easily anyway!)

Cheers

 

[Over Clocker]

WHat are the advantages of SBS? Also, should we look at 2003 or 2008?

We've got 5 users.

Mal