Spec me a SBS Server etc please!

GM2

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We're a small business, currently running SBS2003 standard, with Backup Exec 10d and Eset antivirus on a Dell Poweredge 1800 server, basic spec as follows:

Xeon 3.2GHz/2MB 800FSB
2GB DDR2
4x 160GB SATA HDD in RAID 5
CERC SATA RAID 6 Channel
PV100T 36/72 DAT72

We generally have about 6 to 8 users, most using Dell USFF Pentium 4 3.0 GHz with 1 to 4 GB RAM and 70 to 500 GB HDDs on XP, or a couple of better spec'd laptops on Win 7.

90% of what we use is Office / browsing / email (exchange).
Other 10% is AutoCAD (mainly one machine) and basic photo editing / pdf etc. Plus Sage Accounts and Payroll.

Various phones picking up emails.

Occasional remote access when people out and about or working from home.

The file server has become unreliable. It works OK most of the time, but needs to re-boot every 3 days or so (currently using a batch file) to stop it locking up. THis following a partial reconstruction when it became corrupted when someone was trying to reconfigure partitions!

Everything (except the laptops) is about 7 years old. The desktops seem slow and communication with the server can be slow.

I think our best bet would be to start again with the server and probably go for an SBS2011 set up - but happy to hear other suggestions.

Assuming 'you' agree, can you please suggest what would be a sensible set-up, that will last for another 5-7 years, but isn't over kill. I'm not expecting the business to grow significantly in numbers of people over that time - if it does, we'll look at that then!!

We have a networked copier and 3 networked printers.

Back up nowadays is to a couple of external USB HDDs - tape got too full!

All thoughs and suggestions appreciated.

Thanks
 
Ok, well to start with, would you want to go with SBS 2011 standard or SBS 2011 Essentials (which doesn't have exchange but instead is using Office 365 for mail which is approx £2.65 per month per mailbox)?

Server wise, RAM is cheap these days so i'd put 16Gb in or 24 if you can afford it. I believe the minimum memory requirements for sbs 2011 standard is 8gb.

If you want reliability and performance, you'd want the T310 or T320 chassis as the smaller T110 chassis doesn't do hardware raid or redundant PSU's.

Really I'd say look at a H710 raid controller with 512mb cache, Any quad core xeon, 16Gb ram, and 3 or 4 x SAS 300 Gb drives in Raid 5.

If thats too steep, work out how much over budget you are and you can then see where you can compromise. If you're going Raid 5, then the H700 raid controller is definately recommended due to the cache and accelerated write speed. if you don't get the hardware raid card, then go raid 10 or raid 1 instead and forget about raid 5.
 
Just ran a quick spec through the configurator.

A Dell T320 with redundant power supplies, 16Gb ram, 3 x 300Gb SAS drives, H710 controller, SBS 2011 standard pre-installed comes to £2,726.00
On top of this you can get Backup Exec 2012 SBS edition, and buying 5 external HDD's you can rotate them. Backup Exec 2012 allows you to allocate multiple usb drives to a pool and target that pool for backups, so rotating media becomes easy.
 
I have a client on SBS 2011 with 7 users on this:

Dell T310
Xeon X3450 2.67 Ghz
16GB RAM
H200 RAID - OS 500GB RAID1, DATA 1TB RAID1 on SATA2 7200 drives (I would have gone for the better RAID card but the client wouldn't pay for it).
Backups via SBS backups to two rotated external USB HDD.

The T310 only has 4 hot plug drive slots on the front, so if you need more than that, bear it in mind.

SBS runs very well, but personally I think 16GB is the real world minimum for this OS - I wouldn't want to run it with less. Exchange eats about half the RAM, and the RAM is constantly maxed out but this is by design (I have throttled the 3 SQL instances on the machine though). Generally, though, SBS is not particularly CPU intensive...

I don't run AV on the server as this is always a big overhead - but you'll find differing opinions on this. (In the SBS 2003 era I ran Trend quite often and it was a big hog). I run MSE on workstations and mail comes in and out via a mail hygiene service.

I run any LOB apps on separate machines - keep SBS clean and it will be happy.

I would definitely suggest a UPS... and lastly, if you can run to it, go for the best support plan you can afford from the server vendor. This client was on the Dell Next Business Day and 1 month after the server went in the back plane blew taking the RAID card with it. They were down for two days while it was diagnosed and parts were sourced (but the mail hygiene service queued their mail and also provided them remote access to their mail, so it was just network shares they were missing). They are now on the 4 hour plan :D
 
Definitely as much memory as you can. 32GB is the max and as James mentions, 16GB should be the minimum considered.

Is it doing a hard lock up or are you rebooting for some other issue? The most likely thing that happens with severs that old is that the Exchange server dismounts its stores due to reaching its configured store size.

If your desktops are 7 years old, replacing the server wont speed them up massively. Just a thought.
 
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The company I work for supplies and supports a lot of companies like yours, and we'd generally go along with the sort of thing jameshurrell has suggested. We have one customer who is so tight that they refused to pay the extra £30 or so for 16GB of RAM. Their server has 8GB, and consequently it runs like crap. We're a Trend Micro reseller and as such are pretty much obliged to push their Worry Free Business AV, so all of our customers run it. To be honest, while the AV product is adequate, it's the Hosted Email Security service that makes it worth having. There are a huge number of mail hygiene providers out there, however, and some of them (like Mimecast) offer a great deal more than HES does. It depends on whether it's something you value or not.

wasc said:
Backup Exec 2012 allows you to allocate multiple usb drives to a pool and target that pool for backups, so rotating media becomes easy.
Click to expand...
Just a quick note on this subject, as it's something that we keep coming up against at work; Backup Exec 2012 doesn't look at the drive letter for USB drives like previous versions, instead it looks as the ID of the drive. Some external drive vendors don't give their drives unique IDs, so to Backup Exec 2012, they all look like the same drive. This can be frustrating to deal with if you want to configure retention policies. I can't remember which ones are problematic, but I can find out if you're interested.
 
Saundie said:
Just a quick note on this subject, as it's something that we keep coming up against at work; Backup Exec 2012 doesn't look at the drive letter for USB drives like previous versions, instead it looks as the ID of the drive. Some external drive vendors don't give their drives unique IDs, so to Backup Exec 2012, they all look like the same drive. This can be frustrating to deal with if you want to configure retention policies. I can't remember which ones are problematic, but I can find out if you're interested.
Click to expand...

I find that BE is great for tape backup but unreliable for USB ones. The built in SBS backups arent much better as it doesnt manage the free space correctly. Once the backup drives are full, the snapshots have to be removed manually which is hard work. The best software I've found for USB backups on SBS so far is EaseUS Todo Backup Advanced Server which backs up Exchange also. For tape, BE works fine.
 
For the size company that you are a cloud solution would be a good idea. Lower upfront cost with the ability to expand easily if required obviously for a cost. This would also suite remote workers. The only problem I really foresee is the auto cad element although you could setup an entirely different machine in the cloud so that this doesn't make everything else grind to a halt.
 
Thanks all for the thoughts and suggestions so far. I'll review them in detail over the next day or two.

Any more comments / suggestions etc gratefully received.
 
Ok, well to start with, would you want to go with SBS 2011 standard or SBS 2011 Essentials (which doesn't have exchange but instead is using Office 365 for mail which is approx £2.65 per month per mailbox)?
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I would certainly look at the possibility of going with Server 2012 Essentials with hosted exchange plan 1, you won't have to worry so much about the server having more than 16GB ram and you could go with SATA drives instead of SAS.
 
nightmare99 said:
I would certainly look at the possibility of going with Server 2012 Essentials with hosted exchange plan 1, you won't have to worry so much about the server having more than 16GB ram and you could go with SATA drives instead of SAS.
Click to expand...

Just ensure your internet connection is up to scratch. I've moved clients off hosted Exchange due to poor performance on slow internet connections.
 
I have been using and installing SBS systems since V4.5, I would not give it the time of day now.

SBS 2011 is a dead product based on old technology.

Server 2012 Essentials is so cut down as to be almost useless.

Just go with a Windows Server 2012 + Licences running in Hyper-V (Windows Server 2012 Licence will allow 2x Hyper-V machines) and use a Hosted Exchange Package (I use ExchangeDefender), this will do everything you need - OK no wizards but it does not take long to setup, plenty of info on the web.

Hardware go for at least 16Gb but I would go for minimum of 24Gb, OS on RAID 1 and data on RAID 10 with a decent UPS.

SATA RAID Drives will be fine, but I try to use SAS drives now.
 
marin said:
Just go with a Windows Server 2012 + Licences running in Hyper-V (Windows Server 2012 Licence will allow 2x Hyper-V machines)
Click to expand...

Hi

Thanks for your thoughts - can you please explain this part pf your suggestion in a bit more detail?

Thanks
 
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